Ogita narrowed his eyes, took another look at Chiyo. Recognition dawned. "Oh. Yes." A lascivious smile crept across his face. "It's a pleasure to see you again. But I'm in a bit of a hurry, so if you don't mind-"
"I do mind." Chiyo was so pale that Reiko feared she would faint, but she bravely stood her ground. "You will not leave until you explain to me why you did it."
"Enough of this nonsense." Ogita lifted his hand, perhaps to push Chiyo out of his way, perhaps to strike her down.
Chiyo snatched the dagger from Reiko. She brandished it at Ogita and cried, "Don't you touch me!"
Reiko was as amazed as Ogita looked. Never had she thought Chiyo would have the courage to confront her rapist, let alone threaten him. But she came from the same clan as Sano. The same samurai blood ran in her veins.
Ogita recoiled, his gaze darting between Chiyo's tense, white face to the weapon in her hand, caught between her and the battle that still raged on. "All right, if you must know: I did it because I wanted to. And because I could." He smiled at her shocked expression. "Are you satisfied?"
Such fury blazed in her normally mild eyes that Reiko almost didn't recognize her. Her lips moved, but she could find no words to convey her offense at Ogita's callousness.
"No?" Ogita laughed mockingly. "Well, maybe once wasn't enough for you. Would you like to do it again sometime?"
Reiko gasped in indignation. Chiyo flinched as if Ogita had slapped her and said, "Because of what you did to me, I've lost everything." The dagger trembled in her hands. "My children, my husband, and my honor." Tears glistened in her angry eyes. "And you think it's a joke."
"I don't if you don't," Ogita said patronizingly. "I'm sorry if you're upset, but it's water under the bridge, so let's just forget about it, all right?" He extended his hand to her, waggled his fingers, and said, "Give me that dagger."
Chiyo hesitated. Reiko saw her habit of obeying men weaken her desire to stand up to Ogita. Then she gulped a deep, quick breath, as if she'd jumped off a cliff over the ocean and had to fill her lungs before she hit the water. She swiped at Ogita with all her might. The motion sent him skipping backward and her spinning in a clumsy circle. Ogita chuckled half in shock, half in amusement.
"So you want to play rough?" he said. "Normally, I like a woman with a little fight in her, but I've got to go."
He veered around Chiyo toward the gate. She stumbled in front of him, awkwardly swinging the dagger, totally untrained in combat. Reiko watched in amazement as Chiyo's determination made up for lack of experience. Chiyo chased Ogita straight into the battle. He ran sideways, trying to keep an eye on her and the fighters. Reiko ran after them and grabbed a sword from a dead samurai. How she regretted talking so much about justice! Chiyo had taken Reiko's words to heart. She displayed the recklessness of a warrior on a suicide mission. She seemed oblivious to the swords and spears slicing the air around her. Her desire for revenge on Ogita might get her killed.
Perhaps she wanted death as much as revenge.
Would that Reiko could save her from herself!
Ogita tripped over a bloody corpse. It was Nanbu's. Ogita fell. He sprawled on his stomach over Nanbu. He tried to get up, but the blood was slippery, and he fell again.
Chiyo advanced on him, the dagger raised high. The change that came over her was so startling that Reiko froze in her tracks. Her face was as serene and as hard as a stone Buddha's. Ogita looked up at her over his shoulder as he struggled to rise. All the terror he'd caused her in the pavilion of clouds now glazed his eyes. He opened his mouth to protest, or beg.
Chiyo slashed the dagger down. The blade cleaved deep into Ogita's back. Uttering a pitiful croak, he stiffened. He went limp as he died, lying across Nanbu, his conspirator in sinful crimes.
The unnatural serenity deserted Chiyo. Her face crumpled; she sank to her knees beside Ogita and Nanbu; she began to sob. Reiko moved to console her, but Fumiko came running, cut in front of Reiko, and threw her arms around Chiyo.
"Don't cry," Fumiko said. "They were bad men. They deserved to die."
Now Reiko saw that the battle was over. Nanbu's men and dogs all lay lifeless amid the graves. Only Jirocho and some ten gangsters, and Lieutenant Tanuma and Reiko's other guards remained standing. They were disheveled, bruised, and bloody. In the smoke from the crematoriums and the dropped lanterns whose flames smoldered in the weeds, they looked like survivors of some dreadful catastrophe.
Chiyo wept as though purging all the emotion from her spirit. Reiko felt tears of release sting her own eyes. Jirocho left his gang, walked slowly over to Fumiko, and laid his hand on her hair. He swallowed hard and blinked.
"Don't cry," Fumiko said as she began to sob herself. "It's all right."
"Hear what?" Joju frowned, impatient and threatening, his blade firm against the old woman's throat.
"There's somebody here in this room with us," Sano said.
"There's only you and me and her, and you'll be gone soon," Joju retorted.
Sano gazed around the cabin, lifting his hand, feeling the air. "It's somebody from the spirit world."
Contempt twisted the priest's mouth. "Don't try that on me. I'm the expert at all the tricks. You're just an amateur."
" 'We all have the power to communicate with the spirit world.' " Sano quoted the words Joju had spoken to him during their first meeting.
"But only a few of us know how. You're forgetting the rest of what I said."
"I seem to have become one of the few," Sano said, "and I don't need music or fireworks to hear the spirit. She says she wants to talk to you."
"You're stalling." Joju held the knife firmly against the blue vein visible in the woman's neck. "Get out."
"I'm getting a name," Sano said. "It sounds like…" He paused, straining the muscles of his face, concentrating hard. "Okitsu."
"I don't know anyone by that name." But Joju looked as shocked as the moneylender he'd bilked. He obviously remembered Okitsu, the beggar woman Sano had met outside the temple.
"She was once possessed by evil spirits who told her that people were out to get her," Sano said. "Her parents brought her to you. You performed an exorcism on her."
"How-?"
"How did I know? She just told me." Sano cocked his head, pretended to listen. "She says you raped her and got her pregnant."
Joju beheld Sano with the fearful wonder of a pilgrim hearing a Buddha statue at a woodland shrine tell guilty secrets he thought nobody knew.
Sano gambled that Joju hadn't bothered to find out what had happened to Okitsu afterward. "She died giving birth."
"No," Joju whispered. He evidently didn't know that Okitsu was still alive and begging outside his temple.
Sano remembered something else Joju had said: People want to believe in what I do. He realized that Joju himself believed, and he was as vulnerable to manipulation by false mediums and spirits as his own clients were.
"What does she want?" Joju said reluctantly, unable to help himself. Sano's knowledge of his past had convinced him that the spirit was real.
"There's another spirit with Okitsu," Sano said. "She wants you to meet him."
"Who…?"
"It's her son." Sano paused a beat. "Your son."
"I never had any son." Joju's words were less a denial than a plea for Sano to assure him that they were true.
"Now you know better," Sano said. "He doesn't have a name because he died while Okitsu was having him. She says she's been wandering between the world of the living and the world of the dead, carrying him in her arms. She wants to show him to his father. Here he is."
Sano gestured at the empty air near the bed. Joju's stricken gaze moved to the spot Sano indicated. Sano blew on the cloth that hung from the ceiling over the spot. The cloth fluttered. The flame in the lantern wavered. Joju gasped. Sano could almost see the vision the priest saw-a ghostly woman holding out a baby. The hairs rose on Sano's own neck. The power of suggestion was potent indeed.