The dying man hadn’t made a single sound after that sharp exhalation of breath, though the veins stood out on his forehead from the effort of suppressing his agony. Ryan figured that the silence was a part of the ritual of seppuku. It was a sign of weakness and cowardly failure if you were to scream out at the burning agony.
The man gently lowered the bloodied dagger to the sodden cloth in front of him and straightened. Mashashige shifted on his high throne, narrow fingers playing with the hilt of his own samurai sword.
“Now what?” Jak whispered.
“Watch,” Hideyoshi urged, “and learn.”
A thread of blood wormed from the corner of the ronin’s mouth, where he’d bitten through his tongue. Now he suddenly plunged both hands into the gaping cut across his stomach and plucked out coils of his own intestines.
“Dark night!” J.B. breathed, turning away from the gory spectacle.
Loops of pink, yellow and gray, smeared with the omnipresent blood, lay in the man’s lap. He sat still, looking down at them, a slightly puzzled expression on his face, as if he had no idea what they were and what they were doing there.
Moving with a leisurely grace, Mashashige rose from his chair and walked across to stand behind his dying enemy, slowly drawing his own sword.
The ronin sat still and proud, blood pouring from the hideous gash across his belly. Mashashige stood right behind him and leaned forward, whispering something in the man’s ear. There was the slightest nod of the head.
It was so quick that if Ryan had blinked he would have missed the ending.
The sword rose and fell in a scything arc of glittering silver, striking the ronin at the base of the neck, below the tight bunch of hair. It sliced through like a razor cutting warm butter. There was the merest click of steel on bone as it hacked the spine apart, exiting out of the front of the man’s throat, completely severing the head with that single blow.
The skull dropped forward, just missing the spilled intestines, rolling twice before ending up with the eyes staring at the ceiling. Ryan could have sworn for a few moments that the dead man’s eyes continued to move, but that might have been a trick of the light.
“Amen,” Doc said louder than he intended.
The corpse sat unnervingly still, its hands folded calmly in its lap. The wound to the stomach had already removed a good part of the body’s supply of blood. But the beheading still produced a sizable fountain that gouted into the air, a dozen feet high, pattering down all over the white cloth. Mashashige had obviously known this would happen and had stepped smartly back as soon as he’d delivered the merciful coup de grace. Now he sheathed his sword.
With the tension gone, everyone started talking at once.
The shogun stalked out of the hall without a backward glance and without a word to anyone, vanishing through a small door at the far end, beside a tapestry of a procession of armored samurai walking through a forest of tall, feathery trees beside a limpid lake.
“Can we go now?” Doc asked, pulling out his blue kerchief and mopping sweat from his forehead. “I confess that I would not wish such an ending upon my worst enemies. Not even upon the whitecoats that blighted my life. No, not even upon them! Can we go now?”
Hideyoshi nodded slowly. His eyes sparkled, and he kept licking his lips. “It was so good,” he said. “Oh, that was so good!”
“It was?” J.B. said, laconic as ever. “If that was good, then I’d sure hate to see bad.”
“Such honor and dignity. The ultimate in Bushido, our code of honor. It was truly magnificent.”
“I only saw a life pointlessly, pitilessly and brutally ended,” Ryan said. “A man sticking a sharp knife into his stomach and spilling his guts on the floor while someone else cuts off his head. If that’s your ideal of honor, then you can stuff it up your ass, Hideyoshi.”
“You barbarians do not understand.”
“Damn right we don’t.”
The sec boss of the ville looked around as the room quickly emptied of servants. A couple of old men had appeared with buckets and mops, slowly dragging a large wicker basket behind them.
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