The Shadow and the Star (31 page)

The sudden depth of his look made her shy. "I'm sure that it should be the other way round. I'm your secretary."

"Would you like me to make it right with Sergeant MacDonald? There are ways I could correct his mistake about our—association."

"No!" She gave her head a fierce shake. "No, I don't believe you should have to do with the police any more than you've done already. Sergeant MacDonald is a great disappointment to me. If he wishes to believe disagreeable rubbish, that is his business."

"If not entirely his fault."

Leda sniffed. She had no mind to become sentimental or forgiving over Sergeant MacDonald. "What are you going to do with the sword?" she asked instead.

He rubbed the felt bag along the scabbard. "I'm not certain yet. I didn't intend to have it this long. And now that they think they've found it…"

His frown alarmed her. "Please do be careful."

The corner of his mouth tilted. He shifted his crutch and leaned on it. "As careful as an aged house cat."

"A
lame
, aged house cat. I feel that it would behoove you to stay off of ceiling beams in your condition."

He turned his face to the window again, making no promises. Below, some late party-goer whistled along the empty street. Leda remembered suddenly that she was in her bedroom in the depth of the night, with a caller of very questionable credentials.

"I'll say good-bye now," he murmured. "You can sleep late in the morning."

His train was to leave at eight a.m., a fact which Leda had ascertained by the rather terrifying and wonderful instrument of the telephone, which, after she had overcome her fear of electrocution, and in spite of the earpiece sounding like a hive of buzzing bees, had made a half-day's worth of travel arrangements into a quarter-hour task, with the tickets delivered to the door by a runner before dinner. The world was really extraordinary for a secretary in this modern age.

"Oh, yes, well—good-bye, then.
Bon voyage. "
She felt a little maudlin, suddenly. It was beyond reason difficult to say farewell to a gentleman she barely knew, and a man at that. She reached out impulsively and put her hand over his on the sword. "Thank you! Dear sir—thank you for everything."

The air seemed to grow hushed. She realized that it was her bare palm against his skin; he looked at her with a severity and focus that went through her like the shimmer of moonlight on water and steel. His hand moved beneath hers, tightening on the sword. No more than that.

No more than that, and yet she felt that everything changed, took on a form and substance that made her heart sound loud in her own ears.

You'll find out what he wants from you.

She did not know; she could not tell—but there was such frozen force in him, in his eyes as he traced her face, in his motionless hand, in his very stillness…

She dropped her eyes. He caught her hand in the same instant, pressing a small roll of cloth into it.

"Good night, Miss Etoile." He pushed back from the window, and from her, and moved into the shadows of the room. She heard nothing, not even the click of the door latch, but she knew when he was gone.

She sank down into the window seat. The cloth in her hand unrolled into a ribbon of dark silk. She could not tell the true color in the lamplight from outside, but a small foreign coin gleamed in the middle.

A single coin.

A single coin, like bits of feathers and a silver ring. She found her way to her chair and then back to the window, bending over to try to read in the book by the outside lamplight.

It was there, among the simple line drawings of Japanese money. Five yen. She flipped forward to a section of festivals and gift-giving.
A roll of silk is a mark of respect, which still survives in ceremonial rites
, the book said. And a few pages on:
By the peculiarity of a pun on
goen,
meaning both the coin and a sense of relation, the five-yen coin is considered a symbol of friendship
.

She wrapped the coin and silk between her fingers, holding the bundle up to her lips until it grew as warm as her own hands.

1887

He wanted her. He wanted to touch her. Aboard the
Atlantic steamer he woke up wanting, on the train west he went to sleep to the sound of the rails and to lust, and dreamed of touching her—in dreams, where there was no shame in it, and he would hurt no one. Out of San Francisco, in the state cabin aboard a ship of his own line he stayed isolated, welcoming dreams, not wishing to wake each dawn and look into the mirror at his own face.

Honolulu was green and sun and windblown flowers�and empty. He lived in his small spare room at the harbor office, instead of at home, where the tall shutters were closed and the rooms dim and echoing.

Seeing him on his crutches, Dojun recommended a Chinese bone-setter. The Western splint was taken off, an Oriental support put on. Through a course of ill-smelling herbs and hot-cupping, and a few clandestine visits to an American surgeon, the leg healed slowly; painful, but hurting less each time he tested it.

While Samuel had been away, Dojun had acquired a houseboy, a son of one of the new flood of Japanese immigrants. The boy swept wood shavings and didn't say much, even in Japanese. He addressed Dojun
Oyakata-sama
with a deep bow, giving him a high title and the most courteous of honorifics. Toward Samuel the boy was almost equally respectful, designating him a
meijin
, a notable person, for no reason Samuel could fathom beyond excruciating Japanese manners.

In the last two years, since Japan had agreed to allow plantation workers to emigrate to Hawaii, Dojun was no longer so solitary and remote in his house halfway up the mountain. As often as not when Samuel came there was some Japanese visitor drinking tea or
sake
, a game of
go
in progress. The guests were reticent with Samuel, polite but wary, finding him a strange beast that fit no pattern: a rich
haole
who owned ships, who spoke their language and read
kanji
ideographs and Japanese script.

As Dojun became more sociable with the world, he seemed to become more brusque with Samuel. They had seldom trained together in the last years. Samuel did the physical work on his own, the constant conditioning and practice, but he still went up the mountain nearly every day. Dojun sometimes wished to speak of his art, sometimes only greeted him and went back to his conversation and game of
go
, more often just sat in silent concentration, offering nothing. Or attacked with the random frequency that never quite let Samuel rest.

There was no indulgence given for injury, as Samuel had known there would not be. The path did not end because he'd broken something; nothing stopped and waited for his limitation.
Let go
, Dojun would say,
let go of limitations. Give yourself wholly to the day. Every day. Live as if a sword hangs over your head—because it does
.

Not only in a metaphorical sense. The ceremonial sword he'd stolen was hidden where Samuel hoped to God Dojun would not stumble on it. About that, he never intended his teacher to know. There were days he did not even go to visit—avoiding danger altogether—and then had to double his watchfulness on his own ground, because Dojun would not hesitate to strike him there.

It would not have been so difficult, except for the distraction, the fate that had taken all the floating, chaotic energy of
shikijo
and fused it on
her
. Samuel thought of her with her white shift pulled up over her bare legs, drinking tea and arching her feet in a delicate motion like a dancer; he thought of her head bowed, all that shining hair, her hand poised over her notebook and the soft skin of her nape above the demure turned-down collar. He could not keep his center; he kept falling from the way, losing
zanshin
, the vigilant unattached mind, and with it years of exercise and discipline.

To combat it, he spent long night hours sitting silently, trying not to want, attempting to shed all conscious desire, and still she crept into his mind like a slow heat. He sat peacefully, facing a wall, thinking of nothing… and out of nothing the essence of her formed, the image of her brushing out her hair over naked shoulders, the curve of her back, the white roundness of her hips as she bent to step into her skirt.

He could not go to Dojun with this. The political currents, his contracts, his strategies and plans—those things they could discuss. Even when he was never quite certain whether Dojun was for him or against him in a particular goal, it was good to talk and listen, to expand into possibilities and consider outcomes and intent—like a game of
go
, an infinite potential of combinations in the white and black stones on the board.

Rumors of counterrevolution rose and faded and rose again. Samuel had his sources on both sides; he watched the reformers and sugar planters press to cede Pearl Harbor to the United States, while the king fought to keep the harbor sovereign. He watched the September elections ratify the reformed constitution and bind the king hand and foot. He watched men posture and shout and indulge in petty vindictiveness, but the current ran inexorably in favor of money and power—there was no doubt in Samuel's mind that it was the reformers and their American connections who would prevail in the end.

It seemed an ugly thing, but he understood power and the battle to maintain it. He understood fear. He understood the frustrations of an intelligent, cordial, all too jovial and extravagant monarch. For all of his adult life he'd dealt with the ambitions of businessmen, Western and Oriental, and seen the bewildered islanders slowly stripped of land and potential, shoved into a game with rules made by more cold-blooded men. He understood all of this—whether he approved or objected was immaterial; the important thing was to understand, and predict, and know when and how to move.

He'd built his enterprise for Kai, not for money or influence, not to dance at the palace or topple governments. He'd lent himself to neither side, but kept his intention pure. One future. One task. To be whole and untouched. To make himself more than the sword mounting, more than coarseness inside a fine facade. To forge away what he had been from what he was now, as the anvil forged impurity from iron to create fine steel.

To be worthy of the things he wanted.

To be what she would love.

His heart was a blade… and flawed… flawed…

This weakness dragged him back to the dark, had floated within him for years, never purged. It crystallized now, falling in on itself. It made an opposite pole—on one side Kai and honor and everything he would be; on the other, this warm beckoning darkness that he despised and craved to drown in.

Two years ago, he had bought a four-acre lot high up beside the Nuuanu Valley. In his present restlessness he had plans drawn for the house to be built there. He envisioned Kai in every room: one for her piano, one for the dining table he would build her, a wide lanai because she liked the breeze, a stable for her horses. He interviewed builders and ordered teak and monkeypod and paulownia wood. Just after the September election, the ground was cleared and construction commenced.