Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [41]
He heard a stifled giggle, and looked up to see a single eye peering at him through a sliding door that had beer opened an inch. A second face appeared above the first, and then both disappeared, pushing the door closed. Sonchou’s grandkids. He must be about the weirdest thing they’d ever seen. Except maybe the flying heads.
He thought about Kame and his indifference to dying. It must be easy to be nonchalant about it when you’d cheated death. But Kame had been just as recklessly stoical about it before his resurrection.
Chris turned it over in his mind. This whole samurai thing about death must be so handy for the daimyo – all that emphasis on loyalty, being ready to die for your sovereign lord. All that shame hanging over your head and ready to be used to punish you if you didn’t live up to bushido. Kame had no choice but to attack those warriors head-on.
There were plenty of cowards and traitors, despite the way of the warrior.
It was macho, militaristic nonsense.
81
And yet. . .
Chris remembered the first time he had realized he was going to die someday. When you were a kid you didn’t think about it. You knew it in an abstract, vague way, but you didn’t know it.
He had been playing basketball at the time. He was fourteen, already the tallest kid in his class, pounding up and down the court with an evil grin and the ball thumping up and down in front of him. He remembered the echoes of running and shouting in the high-ceilinged gym, the feel of his hair sticking to his forehead and the back of his neck.
He didn’t know why a basketball game would make him think about death.
The chain of thought was lost to him now – too many years ago. But he remembered the feeling, kind of in his stomach and his head at the same time, as he wondered what it would be like to go up to Heaven. It wasn’t scary so much as weird. Knowing that it was going to happen, no matter what.
You didn’t think about that stuff when you were actually about to be killed.
That was different, your body reacting to the threat the way it had been programmed by those millions of years of evolution. It was more likely to pop up when you were trying to get to sleep at three in the morning.
Because if you did stop to think about it, you’d just freeze up, and kneel there on the cold ground. Kneel there, unable to do what you needed to do – you bastard, you could have killed me – while death opened one of her thousand doors and –
One of the sliding paper doors opened. Chris flinched so hard that he nearly fell over.
Sonchou-san and his wife came into the room. Chris took his hands off his thighs and put them on the straw mat, bowing. ‘After all this excitement, it’s good to have a moment to talk with you,’ said Sonchou, returning the bow.
‘Do please stay for as long as you can.’
Sonchou-san knelt on the other side of the low table, while his wife knelt down beside them. ‘Please have some tea,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’ Chris smiled. She poured him a cup of the watery green stuff.
He was about to pick up the cup with both hands when he remembered that his host was supposed to drink first.
‘Sonchou-san,’ he said, ‘I need to talk to you about Kannon. Or whatever it is up there in the shrine.’
The headman said nothing, bowing his head to his wife as she poured his tea. Chris went on, ‘So long as the pod is here, it’s going to attract trouble.
Both daimyo are going to keep on sending soldiers, until you find yourself right in the middle of a small war.’
Sonchou sipped his tea. ‘You are right, Kuriisu-san,’ he said. ‘But Kannon herself drove them away. They fear her magical powers.’
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‘But don’t you see,’ said Chris, ‘it’s those powers they want. The more miracles she performs, the more determined they’re going to get. She doesn’t belong here.’
‘Then why did she come here? Why heal me, protect us?’