Laura Rowland - The Assassin's Touch

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.