text: Events were moving too fast for Isei. It was time to leave, but not before he had accomplished the objective of his visit. From the slope of the mountain he had noticed the roofs of a temple someone had pointed out to him as dedicated to the Yakushi Nyorai. It was there he had to go to settle his accounts with the daibutsu. He crept carefully down the mountain, perching on a small slope to observe the temple below.
  
  After escaping from the wild samurai, Rosamund had needed to think. She had two alternatives. She could escape the sometimes cloying existence in Goemon's House of Women and escape into the wild world, or she could acquiesce and make the best she could of her existence. There were advantages and disadvantages to each course: freedom against security; the love and support of loyal friends against the cruelty of the outside world; familiarity against strangeness. She had no illusions about her fate in the Japans: she would be found out, her body worked for the pleasure of whomever found her. Her traitorous skin tingled at the thought. On the other hand, she enjoyed despotic control of Goemon's House of Women, and for that matter, of the governor himself. She was so sunk in her meditations, and the passing figure was so silent, that she did not notice the man squatting down before her and peering down through a bush until it had actually happened. Her mind was suddenly made up for her. She recognized the figure of the man with the matchlock who had had her before. Her loins blazed in excitement. He was her salvation, he was a possible support in lieu of Goemon and the others of her friends. With thought came action and she slid across the tiny clearing, her hands out to grasp.
  
  Isei spun around at the sound behind him. Not fast enough. A sudden weight pinned him to the ground, a skillful hand searched in his pants and gripped his penis.
  
  "Don't struggle!" a voice hissed in his ears, and then a demanding full mouth was applied to his. He dropped his ready matchlock and cupped the two full breasts that were pressed into his chest. The nun again. Not his, but the one who had come after.
  
  "I have found you," she said contentedly, rolling on to her back and pulling him deeply into her. They struggled out of their clothes, their organs deeply joined, moving in a rhythm of their own.
  
  Isei pushed at her lovingly. His teeth nipped at her soft parts, his hands explored her bulges and hollows, urged on by her whispered instructions, finally doing all that needed to be done by wordless empathy. He knew that he had to satisfy her for his own satisfaction, and moreover, knew how to do it. Her body was a sculpture he was building out of instinct and passion as his father was wont to carve the beautiful wood of the deep forest. Hands, lips, tongue, chest, penis. All his body was concerned with was the pleasing of the vision beneath, then above him, then lying by his side.
  
  The strange, pale-faced, golden-haired woman was now moving with him, matching each of his thrusts with one of her own. Her strange round eyes were open, looking deeply into his. He pinched her ass mounds hoping to cause some pain but she only wriggled gratefully. The words of the nun came back to him. The pain brought pleasure to this golden vision and he struggled to meet her demands. She began shuddering in an orgasm that continued and continued beyond anything he had ever witnessed. Still he did not cease his explorations and his efforts, turning every nerve ending in her milk-white skin to a blazing pinpoint of pleasure.
  
  The pain and the delight mixed in Rosamund's belly to a volcano that spewed an unquenchable fire. She barely moved an exterior muscle, but her vaginal tissues stroked and milked the man's perfect penis with knowledge and love. He approached orgasm many times and each time she managed, without effort and without making him withdraw, using only her vaginal skill, to stop the progress before he reached the crest. She knew that for him, as for her, this was the ultimate bodily delight. She thought she actually was him, taking delight and pleasure in her own body, and her own continuing orgasm, like a phoenix feeding on its own flames, grew even higher. Her mind and body completely uncoupled, and from a point of view high above the two bodies on the ground she floated in a cloud of pleasure.
  
  Isei's eyes darted suddenly from Rose's beatific face to a space between two trees. Sugiyama was standing there looking at them, an evil grin on his face. He started pulling out of Rosamund and her loins clutched at him. He knew that she was nearing her final climax. The tie between them was so intense that he knew every nerve end of her body was singing. She was in complete harmony with him. His matchlock was barely out of reach. The need for defense, and the imperative need to complete this act to its final glorious climax warred in him. Rational thought won out and he chose to engage in that which was so rare the sages dared not talk about it. Detached, Isei's mind watched life and death unfold. Rosamund cried out. A sweet, high piercing unhuman sound of pure exaltation. All her physical muscles contracted at the same moment, merging her completely with Isei's body. His penis became a part of her, the interaction between it and her vagina the center of the world. Her spirit finally, for one glorious and eternal moment, found itself and centered perfectly in the universe. Then reality rushed in once again and her body slackened back into the normal shuddering, demanding clay. Events started taking place again.
  
  The sword blade whistled down, shining bright lightning aimed at the space where Isei's broad back had been a moment before. Rosamund's mounded breasts, slightly flattened over her rib cage rose towards the blade. Isei rolled swiftly away and his matchlock leaped to his hand.
  
  Time stopped for all three of them there in the small glade. The wind in the pines paused. Birds and other life forms froze in their place. Sugiyama brought his sword down in a blow that would cut both torsos in two. Even his death would not stop the cut. He knew it better than he had known any blow to be true before. This, now, here, was the ultimate stroke. Not as he had expected it, in battle, but the true stroke nonetheless. In the timeless moment of the sword's movement he wondered why this would be so, striking at an unprotected back, then the unresisting front of a beautiful strange woman. No expert against which to test his skill, and yet the feel of reaching the climax of his skill against the most deadly of opponents.
  
  The sword descended in a moment that was eternity. Isei reached the matchlock. For the briefest spark of a second he smiled at himself, knowing the end of his life was here. Casually, not realty aiming, in the briefest of seconds that lasted an entire age, he shot.
  
  Lead slug, dull and almost ungainly, travelling fast, intercepted the shiny polished slab of worked steel. Layer after layer of welded steel and iron, thousands and hundreds of thousands of them accepted the stress of the lead's energy, and when they could not do so anymore, flew off at a tangent.
  
  Rosamund had barely recovered from her orgasm, her insides still heaving, when the man ripped himself from between her legs. She had time to see that her horizon was filled with the image of the rough samurai who had raped her before. His face was frozen into a mask of calm divinity, as if he had seen his god face to face. She heard the bang, saw the sword fly from the samurai's hand as its blade shivered into fragments. She rose with horror in time to see the sudden twitch of movement as the samurai's short-sword buried itself almost to the hilt in her newfound lover's neck. He was kneeling motionless, his matchlock held loosely at his hip, slight smile on his face. Then Isei the Forester toppled over. A last scion of the Taira brought to ground near the city of the glory of his ancestors.
  
  Sugiyama froze after the throw. Suddenly he knew why he had felt the imminence of his own death. He stared incredulously at the dead gunner, then at the woman the gunner had saved. He looked at the lead-stained blade fragments of his katana for one last moment, back at the man who had mastered him, then turned his back and stumbled into the forest. Rosamund gently cradled her nameless lover's dead head. No tears would fall. He had died as he wanted to, and only he and she knew that he had given her more than any lover before.