Now, seized by urgency, the shogun cried, “Yes! Yes! What are you waiting for?” His hands flapped, shooing Yanagisawa and Sano away from him. “Go!”
As Sano strode out of the room beside Yanagisawa, he looked back and saw the shogun slumped on the dais, face buried in his hands, mourning his own rashness.
27
The Dragon King regarded Reiko with stern disapproval. “There is blood on your clothing,” he said.
Again he’d summoned her from the women’s quarters, where Keisho-in and Lady Yanagisawa were bathing the baby and Midori slept. Reiko surmised that he’d brought her to his chambers to satisfy the passions she’d aroused in him earlier. Mustering the courage for another attempt to maneuver him, swallowing her fear, she looked down at her kimono and the red stains from Midori’s childbirth.
“You must wash,” said the Dragon King. “Come with me.”
He led Reiko downstairs, into a room that smelled of decay and contained a bathtub sunken in a floor of wooden slats. Vines growing on lattice-covered windows imparted a murky green hue to the evening light. Black mold dotted the plank walls.
“Take off your clothes,” the Dragon King said.
Reiko abhorred the very thought, but she was keenly aware of his power to hurt her should she displease him. And unless she proved her willingness to obey, she would never overcome his distrust, and her plan to free herself and her friends would never work. She turned her back to him, untied her sash, and dropped her outer robe.
He didn’t speak, but she heard his breathing grow harsh. She reluctantly slipped off the white under-kimono and stood naked within the aura of his palpable lust. Her flesh rippled, and her muscles tensed; her spirit withered as she thought of Sano and deplored that this man should see what only her husband had the right to behold.
“Exquisite,” the Dragon King murmured, trailing his fingers along her torso, down the curve of her hip.
Involuntarily clenching her buttocks, Reiko winced and braced herself for the assault that she’d feared since she’d first met him. Her throat constricted, nearly choking her.
The Dragon King snatched away his hand. “Go ahead and bathe now,” he said in a subdued voice. “There’s soap and a bucket on the shelf. Excuse me.”
Reiko heard him leave the room. Her fear eased, although minimally. For some reason he kept skirting the brink of ravishing her, then retreating, but this might be her last reprieve before he yielded to desire. She noticed that he’d taken her clothes. She would have run away stark naked, if not for the guards she heard outside, and her captive friends. Reiko filled the bucket from the tub of water that smelled of the lake. She poured the water over herself, then scrubbed her body and hair with the cloth bag of rice-bran soap. Despite the circumstances, she found relief in washing after days without a bath. She rinsed, then immersed herself in the tub.
The Dragon King appeared at the door. He carried a bundle of folded fabric. “Here are some cloths to dry yourself, and fresh robes to wear,” he said.
“Thank you,” Reiko said, shivering in the chilly water as he stared through it at her body beneath the surface.
“Are your new quarters satisfactory?” he said.
“Yes, very.” The sliding door and wall panels were solid and firmly locked by vertical beams inserted through the latches and floor on the outside; but Reiko had discovered that the wooden bars on the window were rotted and breakable.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier.” Squatting at the edge of the tub, the Dragon King spoke in a low, conspiratorial tone: “From now on, when you’re not with me, you’ll be guarded only by Ota, whom I trust. The others won’t be allowed near you.”
“Many thanks,” Reiko said, glad to hear he’d reduced the watch on her. “I feel much safer now.”
The Dragon King nodded absently, watching Reiko. “You look cold. You’d better come out.”
He stepped back from the tub and waited. Reiko turned away from him as she rose, then climbed out of the water. Quickly she dried herself and put on the clothes he’d brought-a white under-robe and a teal silk kimono printed with white flowers. She tied the aqua sash, wondering where he’d gotten women’s clothes. As she combed her fingers through her wet hair, the flowers on the kimono caught her eye.
They were anemones.
The clothes the Dragon King had given her had belonged to his dead beloved.
A chill passed through Reiko as she realized that he must have kept them during the twelve years since Anemone had died. She smelled a faint, stale whiff of perfume and body odor on the robes: They’d not been washed after Anemone last wore them. Reiko pictured the Dragon King fondling the clothes, sniffing their scent, arousing himself. She understood he was perpetuating the illusion that she was the embodiment of Anemone by dressing her in them. Revolted, she turned to face him.
His strange features were luminous with admiration. He intoned, “The pale wraith of your spirit departed its lifeless body. You drifted in enchanted slumber, down unfathomable depths, through watery channels, to the palace where we reunited.” He touched Reiko’s wet hair. “Come. There’s something I must show you.”
He led her up to his chamber and beyond the sliding partition. There, in a smaller room, Reiko saw the source of the incense odor that pervaded the palace and shrouded him. Brown sticks smoked in a brass bowl atop a small iron trunk. Near the bowl, candles burned around a painted color portrait of a young woman.
“This is you during the prime of your life, Anemone,” the Dragon King told Reiko. “You are as beautiful now as you were then.”
Reiko discerned a vague likeness to herself in the stylized portrait.
“I’ve kept your funeral altar since you died,” he said. “My faithfulness has brought you back to life.”
Glancing around the room, Reiko saw his bedding rolled up in a corner. Here was morbid evidence that he slept with the altar, worshiping the dead.
“Who was she?” Reiko said, driven by curiosity to risk disrupting the charade that she herself was Anemone.
The Dragon King gazed at the portrait. “She was my mother.”
“Your mother?” Surprise struck Reiko, because his behavior toward her wasn’t filial in the least. “But I thought… ”
“That she was my lover?” The Dragon King smiled at Reiko’s reaction. “Indeed she was.” He’d switched from speaking to her as if she were Anemone to addressing her as the stranger in whom he thought Anemone’s spirit reposed. “We were much closer than mothers and sons usually are.”
He had engaged in carnal relations with his own mother! Reiko was shocked into silence. She recalled the Dragon King telling her about his dream in which Anemone had taught him calligraphy. Her mental image of the scene underwent a sudden alteration. Instead of an adult couple indulging in love play, Reiko saw a mother fondling an adolescent son, initiating him into forbidden sex. And now the son, grown into this evil, tortured man, wanted to recreate his sordid past with her. The magnitude of his perversion and insanity horrified Reiko.
“Anemone is the only woman I’ve ever loved,” the Dragon King said, ignoring Reiko’s discomfiture. “I never married because I couldn’t forget her.”
That was why he had no children and blamed Anemone for his lack, thought Reiko.
A pained smile twisted his face. “She was less faithful than I. She gave her love to someone else.”
And that explained the anger with which he’d lashed out at Reiko and cursed her as a whore.
“But I can’t entirely blame her,” he said. “Women are weak, and susceptible to villains bent on seduction. When that man came along, she was helpless to resist him.”
Reiko listened, compelled by morbid fascination, yet sure that the rest of the Dragon King’s story couldn’t top his earlier revelation.
“The man was my father’s lover first,” continued the Dragon King. “But he wasn’t satisfied to make one conquest in our household. When he visited my father, he would sneak flirtatious looks at Anemone. He paid her compliments. When she served tea, he would touch her hand as he accepted the bowl from her and gaze into her eyes. My father was oblivious, but not I.” The Dragon King’s expression turned resentful. “I saw that man trying to win Anemone’s affection. I saw her blush and smile. I saw her sneak him into the garden late at night and make
