The Miko - 02 by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

longing, and a part of her wanted to draw it out as long as possible. After all this time, she did not want the end to come so soon, certainly not until the time of her own choosing.
    Oh, yes, it had been a stroke of genius suggesting to Sato that he invite the gaijin to the wedding. “Especially this Linnear,” she had whispered in his ear late one night. “We all know his family’s history. Think what face it will give you to have him present at such an event!”
    Yes, yes, Nicholas, she crooned silently as she stalked him high above his head, the time is coming soon when I will look directly in your eyes and see that strength crumble and fly away like gray ash in the wind.
    She felt intoxicated, her throat constricted, the muscles in her thighs trembling with the flutter of her heart as she felt herself drawn inexorably toward him. But she used all her training to restrain herself from destroying in an instant of ecstatic gloating everything she had worked for for so long.
    Now she broke away from his orbit, walking more quickly, ignoring the glances of those she passed, the lust of the men, the envy of the women; she had become inured to that. It was time to pick up Yōki; Sato would soon be home from the wars.
    Akiko watched Yōki out of the corner of her eye as they sped through the center of Tokyo and out again. She is a magnificent creature, Akiko thought. I have chosen well. She had found Yōki some weeks ago and when she was certain of her choice had struck up a conversation with her. That had led to an odd—at least Akiko saw it as that—kind of friendship. Its borders were the night when, as far as Yōki was concerned, they both emerged like nocturnal birds.
    Akiko had once asked Yōki what occupied her during the day. “Oh, on and off, I’m a saleslady,” she had said. “You know, door to door. Perfumes and cosmetics. Otherwise I watch television. Not only dramas but programs where I learn calligraphy, flower arranging—even the tea ceremony.”
    In a culture where 93 percent of the population watched TV at least once a day that was, perhaps, not surprising. Yet it nevertheless chilled Akiko that her country was teaching its population by proxy. She had learned the tea ceremony from her mother, and she remembered watching the older woman’s face, listening to the tone of her voice, seeing the patterns on her kimono moving just so here and not at all there, resolving to memorize every detail no matter how tiny for those, her mother had once told her, were all that would be noticed.
    Could the emissions of an electronic cathode ray tube provide such teaching? She was sure it could not, and she found herself disgusted when she thought of the number of women being taught in such an impersonal manner.
    But outwardly she showed none of this disdain. Yōki was important to her—at least for the next several hours.
    The limo pulling up onto the gravel verge of the two-story house pushed her thoughts back to the present. Seiichi Sato lived just north of Ueno Park in Uguisudani in Taitō-Ku. A block and a half to the southwest was wide Kototoi-dōri, the avenue that curled like a serpent around two sides of the park. Beyond, the high tops of the carefully pruned cypress stood stark and utterly black against the faintly pink and yellow glow from the Ginza and Shinjuku nightspots. The trees were the natural markers of the Tokugawa Shōgun graveyard across the myriad railroad tracks in the northern end of Ueno.
    Sato’s house was large by Tokyo standards, built on the ken principle, the standard six-foot unit of construction. It was made of bamboo and cypress; the three-layered roof was of terra cotta tile. The far end of the house contained a great notch to accommodate a more-than-one-hundred-year-old cryptomeria whose boughs overgrew the sheltering eight-foot fence, swaying over the road itself.
    The driver came around and opened the rear door for them, and Akiko took her charge inside.
    Seiichi Sato sipped hot