The Betrayal of the Living by Nick Lake

Author:Nick Lake [Lake, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857898104
Publisher: Corvus

CHAPTER 29

SHUSAKU CLOSED his hands on the ball, feeling its smoothness and hardness. He concentrated. Taro had an advantage over him when wielding it – the boy could see, where Shusaku could not. But perhaps if he focused, if he meditated, he too could use its power. He could feel Taro behind him, the enraged pounding of his pulse in his veins. He ignored it.

Work, ball, work, he implored it.

He was no longer ever really conscious of when his eyes were open and when they were closed. It was not important; he couldn’t see anyway. He closed them for sleep, he thought, out of habit more than anything else. But apart from that he was not concerned with what they did. So when a thin bluish line appeared out of the darkness, stretching horizontally, he was thrown at first. It was only when he blinked that he realized it was moonlight, glowing through a crack in his eyelids.

He opened his eyes fully.

He could see.

Oh, my dear gods, he thought. How could Taro have thrown it away? His eyes had been burned out of his head by the sun, but now he was holding a thing owned by the Buddha, and his injuries were meaningless. The ball in his hand was clear, crisp. Every contour and imperfection of the rock face beside him buzzed in the sharpness of his vision. He gazed around, stunned, only half hearing the shouts of Taro and his friends behind him. He looked down at the object in his hands that had done this, that had wrought this miracle.

Beneath the glass of the ball hung a tiny round moon, suspended in space, and beneath that the sphere of the Earth, shadowed on one side, light on the other. He turned it – sure enough, on the other side was a little sun, burning down. He turned it back to the moon-side, where he presumed Japan lay, and peered down into it. Taro lunged for the ball, but he turned, his sides protected by the rock. He had seen the boy do it; surely it could not be too hard?

He stared down at the miniature Earth in his hand, saw small clouds scudding across its surface. He glanced up; clouds, racing overhead. He understood that what he was seeing was not a representation of the world – it was the world, in miniature. He was holding the world in his hands.

‘How did you get that?’ said his charge, his protégé, his son.

‘I followed you,’ said Hiro. ‘I recovered it from the sea.’

Now Taro turned to Hiro, and if Shusaku could have taken away the pain and betrayal on Taro’s face, he would have done it in a heartbeat.

‘No...’ said Taro.

‘I’m sorry,’ said his friend.

Taro looked away from Hiro, as if his friend no longer existed. ‘Give it to me, Shusaku,’ he said. ‘He’s Enma! You can’t defeat him.’

‘I won’t give it to you,’ Shusaku replied. ‘And Enma can be defeated. It has been done before. Even death has to die.

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