Young Samurai_ The Way of the Sword - Chris Bradford [3]
And when the weeds begin to grow
It’s like a garden full of snow…’
Jack darted along the narrow corridor towards the kitchen.
The cottage was all shadows, as murky and dank as a catacomb. A glimmer of light seeped through a small crack in the kitchen door. From within, his mother’s voice faded and rose like the sighing of the wind:
‘And when the snow begins to fall
It’s like a bird upon the wall
And when the bird away does fly
It’s like a hawk up in the sky…’
Jack put his eye to the crack and could see his mother sitting in her apron with her back to the door, peeling potatoes with a large curved knife. A single candle lit the room, making the knife’s shadow upon the wall appear as monstrous as a samurai sword.
‘And when the sky begins to roar
It’s like a lion at the door…’
Jack pushed at the kitchen door. It grated over the stone-clad flooring, but still his mother did not look round.
‘Mother?’ he asked. ‘Did you hear me…?’
‘And when the door begins to crack
It’s like a stick across your back…’
‘Mother! Why won’t you answer me?’
The rain was now falling so hard outside it sounded like fish frying in a pan. Jack stepped across the threshold and approached his mother. She kept her back towards him, her fingers working feverishly with the knife, stripping the skin off potato after potato.
‘And when your back begins to smart
It’s like a penknife in your heart…’
Jack tugged on her apron. ‘Mother? Are you all right?’
From the other room, Jack heard a stifled scream, and in that moment his mother turned on him, her voice suddenly harsh and grating:
‘And when your heart begins to bleed
You’re dead, and dead, and dead indeed.’
Jack found himself staring directly into the sunken eye sockets of an old hag, her oily grey hair crawling with lice. The figure, whom he had believed to be his mother, now raised the knife to Jack’s throat, a sliver of potato hanging from the blade like freshly peeled skin.
‘You’re dead indeed, gaijin!’ rasped the shrivelled witch, her rotten breath making Jack gag.
She gave a callous laugh as Jack ran screaming for the door.
Jack could hear Jess’s anguished cries deep within the cottage. He burst into the front room.
The large armchair, where his father always sat, faced the fire in the grate. The flickering flames silhouetted a shrouded figure seated in it.
‘Father?’ enquired Jack tentatively.
‘No, gaijin. Your father’s dead.’
A gnarly finger protruded from a black-gloved hand and pointed to the prone body of Jack’s father, who lay broken and bleeding on the wooden floorboards in the far corner of the room. Jack recoiled at the gruesome fate of his father, and the floor began to heave like the deck of a ship.
With a single leap, the shrouded figure flew from the chair to the latticed casement window. The intruder clutched Jess in his arms.
Jack’s heart stopped.
He recognized the single jade-green eye glowering at him through the slit in the hood. The figure, dressed head-to-toe in the black shinobi shozoku of a ninja, was Dokugan Ryu.
Dragon Eye. The ninja who had killed his father and hunted Jack ruthlessly and was now kidnapping his little sister.
‘No!’ screamed Jack as he flung himself across the room to save her.
But other ninja, like black widow spiders, materialized from the walls to stop him. Jack fought them off with all his might, but every faceless ninja he defeated was immediately replaced by the next.
‘Another time, gaijin!’ hissed Dragon Eye as he turned and disappeared into the raging storm. ‘The rutter is not forgotten.’
2
THE RUTTER
The pale light of dawn filtered through the tiny window and rain continued to drip sluggishly from the lintel to the sill.
A single eye stared through the gloom at Jack.
But it was not Dokugan Ryu’s.
It belonged to the Daruma Doll that Sensei Yamada, his Zen teacher, had given him during his first week of samurai training at the Niten Ichi Ryū, the ‘One School of Two Heavens’ in Kyoto.
More than a year had passed since Jack’s fateful arrival in Japan when a ninja attack upon