Kill the Shogun (8 page)

Normally, Ieyasu’s battle plan would have been disastrous. His smaller army could be crushed on both flanks by the superior forces sitting on the hills on either side of him. But Ieyasu had bribed the commanders on the flanks to either stay neutral or to attack their supposed allies. Of all the forces loyal to Hideyoshi’s heir that were bribed, the key was the men of Kobayakawa Hideaki, who sat on a hill and anchored the right flank of the army opposing Ieyasu. Kobayakawa was an adopted son of Hideyoshi, so his treachery was especially surprising and odious.

Survivors of the battle told Kaze that the night before, it had rained heavily, and during the early morning, the entire valley was covered with a dense fog. It was impossible to see either friend or foe. Kaze had been in several battles, and he could imagine what it must have been like.

Through the cold, damp fog, the thunder of the
taiko
war drums was heard. The deep sound of the drums, some as tall as a man, shook the earth if you stood next to them. Some of the drums had arrowheads inside them, to give them the mystic power to penetrate men’s souls. The powerful drumming quickened the blood and put men into the mood to kill or be killed.

The battle was desperate, with both sides winning alternating advantage as the fighting surged back and forth. The opposing general, Ishida Mitsunari, was neither skilled nor a great leader,
but he should have prevailed, based on sheer numbers and superior position. Instead, lord after lord refused his orders to attack Ieyasu’s forces. At first, Kobayakawa simply refused to fight, too, but Ieyasu had a warning volley of musket fire sent his way, and Kobayakawa fell on the flank of his own army. By early afternoon, the hour of the Ram, the battle was lost.

And afterward?

Many committed suicide, because their cause was lost. Some fought to the last man. That’s what Kaze’s Lord did, along with his men. It is what Kaze would have done, had he been at Sekigahara. Others fled.

After Ieyasu won, it was time to count fallen comrades and view the severed heads of the enemy. At Sekigahara, Ieyasu viewed heads for hours, commenting on the various foes he had defeated. He knew most of them. Some were former allies, and others were longtime enemies.

Ishida ran from the battlefield, but after three days of starving and exposure in the area around Mount Ibuki, he was captured and handed over to Ieyasu. When he was given food and medicine, Ishida declared he would put Ieyasu to the trouble of killing him, instead of committing suicide. Ieyasu obliged.

While on his way to the execution grounds, Ishida was offered a persimmon, which he refused, he said, because it might upset his digestion. When someone expressed surprise at Ishida’s concern for his digestion, considering the circumstances, Ishida said, “That shows how little you understand. You can’t know how things will turn out, so while you are still breathing, you should take care of your body!” Ishida should have enjoyed the persimmon, Kaze thought, because his head was detached from his body just minutes later.

Kaze knew his Lord had died leading a suicide charge near the end of the battle. His Lord saw the traitors defecting to Ieyasu’s
side, and he knew the battle was lost. He took the samurai of Kaze’s clan and plunged into the midst of the traitors, killing many of them before he was cut down himself. Kaze could imagine his Lord at Sekigahara, wearing his best suit of armor, the one with the blue silk cords, leading the doomed charge.

S
itting in the ofuro with his eyes closed, Kaze could picture that charge. He told himself that the drops running down his face were sweat, not tears. But they tasted like tears when they reached his lips.

Creak.

One of the floorboards outside the bathhouse made a sound. Kaze remained motionless. If it was someone coming to the bathhouse normally, then it would be easy to hear their steps as they approached. Instead, one or more people were trying to sneak up to the door.

The door was suddenly slid back, and a man charged into the bathhouse, his sword at the ready. Kaze instantly stood, reaching down and drawing his sword as he did so. All in one motion, he extracted his sword from its scabbard and swept it forward. The tip of the sword caught the man in the sternum and his own forward motion drove the blade in.

Surprised, the man crumpled at the edge of the tub, dying, as a second man entered the bathhouse. Kaze rolled out of the tub, landing on his feet with his back to the new assailant. As his feet hit the floor, he pivoted, with his sword cutting a flat arc that came around and caught the second attacker across the neck and shoulder. With a groan of pain, this man hit the floor, to join his companion.

Kaze stood, naked, and facing the door with his sword in the aimed-at-the-eye position. In the doorway, a third man stood, one
foot on the threshold of the bathhouse, with the other still in the hall. He held his sword in one hand, his other hand on the edge of the door.

“Well?” Kaze said.

After a second’s hesitation, the man slammed the door shut and started running down the hall for reinforcements.

B
oss Akinari and a dozen of his men burst into the bathhouse a minute later. The two men on the floor were obviously dead, their dark blood covering the wet boards of the bathhouse.

“Where is he?” Akinari asked.

“He was here a minute ago,” the third assassin said.

Akinari quickly looked at the room, his gaze alighting on the stool that had Kaze’s kimono still folded on it, and the sandals next to them.

“He’s run outside,” Akinari said. “Fan out and find him!”

“But what does he look like?” one of his men asked.

“Look! His kimono is still here. He’ll be naked and barefoot. How many naked men are you going to find on the street? Just find him and kill him! Scatter!”

Akinari and his men tumbled down the hallway, looking for a naked man trying to escape them.

In the silent bath, the echoes of their pounding feet dissipated and died. The glow of the paper lanterns cast deep shadows and made wavy orange streaks on the black surface of the water. Suddenly, from the middle of the ofuro, the surface of the water was disturbed. A head of black hair appeared, with the silver ribbon of a sword blade next to it. Kaze surfaced from the black water holding his katana.

He stood in the ofuro and listened, seeing if the hallway was clear.

Look at how he walks.
Is it the walk of a ghost?
Does the toe touch first?

N
obu entered his room. The shutters on the window were closed and the single candle he held hardly penetrated the gloomy darkness.

He sighed. He was tired. Like the rest of Boss Akinari’s men, he had spent most of the night looking for the ronin. Unsuccessfully.

His futon was already spread on the floor. He lived in Boss Akinari’s house, just like all the high-ranking members of the gang, and the servants would take out the bedding from a shelf every night and spread it on the floor of the plain room, ready for sleep.

Nobu was debating about going to get a bath before flopping down on the futon when a voice said, “Why did your Boss want to kill me?”

Nobu was a man not easily startled, but the voice coming from the dark corners of his own room made him jump. He held the candle up, so the light could penetrate the gloom. In the darkest corner, Nobu saw the dim outline of a man sitting. The figure
moved his arm and into the yellow light of the candle the tip of an unsheathed sword appeared. The ronin!

“Why did your boss want to kill me?” Kaze repeated, letting his naked sword add urgency to the question.

“How did you get in here?” Nobu asked.

“I never left,” Kaze replied.

“How did you know this was my room?”

Kaze pointed with his sword. “After the maids laid out the futons, it was easy to tell which one was yours. It’s twice the size of a normal one.”

“But—”

“I’m the one who stayed just so I could ask you a few questions,” Kaze interrupted. “It is most impolite to ignore my questions as I answer yours. Now, why did Boss Akinari want me killed?”

“He wanted to collect the reward. He knows.”

For a moment, Kaze thought that Akinari knew that he was a man wanted by the Tokugawas because of his ties to the Toyotomis. He decided to clarify this. “He knows what?”

“That you tried to assassinate the Shogun.”

Now it was Kaze’s turn to be surprised. He stayed silent, to see if silence would extract more information. It did.

Nobu licked his lips. Then he said, “I didn’t want you to be killed, but the reward for your head is ten thousand ryo. No one could pass that up. There’s a thousand ryo just for leading the authorities to you.”

Even a thousand ryo was considerably larger than the reward for turning in a Toyotomi loyalist.

Kaze stayed silent for several more minutes, but Nobu didn’t volunteer more. Finally, Kaze asked, “How does Boss Akinari know about this reward? I haven’t seen notice boards posted around the city.”

“The district captain told him. We give a payoff to him every
month. Otherwise we couldn’t operate a gambling den in this place. He said they don’t want to post the reward on public notice boards yet, so you won’t know and will be surprised.”

Kaze was indeed surprised, but not because someone had suddenly tried to take his life. That had happened often enough. It was the thought that the Tokugawas had identified him as Ieyasu’s would-be assassin that surprised him.

“Why do they think I’m the one who tried to kill the Shogun?”

“You were spotted near the place where the gunman hid.”

The young captain who looked at Kaze so strangely when Kaze was doing his street act with the tops.

“Well, I didn’t try to kill Ieyasu-sama,” Kaze said conversationally. “If I had, he would be dead. But I suppose that doesn’t matter if the authorities think I’m the one who tried to kill him. What a bother!”

Nobu looked like he was going to ask about what kind of bother it was, but Kaze stood up. He wasn’t going to explain to the big wrestler about his quest to find the daughter of his Lord and Lady. Becoming the most hunted man in Edo would make it difficult to observe the Little Flower Whorehouse to see if the girl was still there, and to develop a plan to rescue her if she was. “What a bother!” he said again.

Kaze pointed to Nobu with his sword. “You’re a good fellow, and I like you. I should kill you now, to keep you quiet. Instead, I’m going to walk out of here and I want you to treat our conversation as a dream. You must be tired, spending the night in the cold looking for me. I suggest you crawl onto the futon and go to bed. But whatever you do, please don’t make me sorry I let you live. If you do, I promise I will do my best to come back and correct that mistake.”

Then, without warning, Kaze took a cut at the candle. The sword moved with such speed that Nobu heard it more than saw it. A quick swish of air that seemed too gentle a sound to carry
death with it. Nobu didn’t see the sword hit the candle, but the light was snuffed out. Nobu could see the dying ember of the wick, fading to orange in the darkness. Incredibly, the ronin had cut off the burning wick of the candle, but left the rest intact.

Too stunned to move, Nobu strained to hear where the ronin was. He heard nothing, but suddenly, behind him, the door to his room opened. The dim light of the hall spilled into the darkened room. He turned to see who was entering the room and instead he saw the ronin leaving. Nobu’s spine tingled at the thought of a man who could move so quickly and so silently. He watched the ronin’s feet as he left the room. He wanted to make sure the ronin walked with his heel touching the ground before his toes. Ghosts walked with their toes touching first, and he wanted to assure himself that this ronin was a man, and not an
obake.

After he was sure the ronin was gone, Nobu made his way to the bath. His body was covered with sticky, dried sweat. He tried to tell himself that the sweat had come from the search, but he knew he had not been sweaty when he walked into his room.

The bathhouse had been cleaned up. The bodies of the slain men were removed, and the walls and floor were still wet from countless buckets of water used to wash off the blood. Because of this extra effort, the attendant was not around. Nobu surmised that, like all of them, the attendant was tired after this extraordinary night. He stuck his hand into the ofuro and the water was hot enough, so he decided to take his bath without getting the attendant to help scrub his back and tend to the fire.

As Nobu started stripping down, he noticed that only one of the wooden stools was sitting on the bathhouse floor. There were usually two stools in the bathhouse, and Nobu was so large that he generally put the two of them side by side to sit on.

He looked around for the second stool, and found the pieces of it neatly stacked in a corner. Nobu was puzzled. In another corner of the bathhouse, he saw something curious. He went over
and picked it up, holding it up to the lantern that illuminated the bathhouse so he could see it better. Someone had taken one of the legs from the broken stool and carved a Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. Then the artist had placed the Kannon so it looked upon the place where the two men had died.

Nobu looked around and saw nothing else to explain the little statue. He looked back at the Kannon, seeing a face of infinite beauty and tranquility. Reverently, he placed the Kannon back in place.

K
aze continued to move as silently as a shadow cast by a swinging lantern as he made his way back to the merchant’s house. He had decided he would not spend the night, but there was something there he wanted; his sword-cleaning materials. It was common for a samurai to get his sword wet, in rain or when fording streams, but every samurai also took care of his sword, because the sword was an expression of his spirit and soul.

Kaze had just immersed his sword in water. Now he wanted to clean his sword and give it a light coating of oil, to protect it. “Fly Cutter” was precious to him. It was new, and he had never had a sword so lively and finely balanced. It was a natural extension of his arms, and was rapidly becoming part of his spiritual core.

Kaze approached the merchant’s house and observed it for several minutes. All seemed normal, with light peeking out through tiny gaps in the shutters. Kaze crossed to the house and opened the door.

“Tadaima. I’m home,” Kaze said.

The merchant’s wife and the maid were sitting on the floor, whispering to each other across a low table. They looked up when Kaze entered, and gave an answering bow of their heads as Kaze dipped his head in greeting. He was puzzled that they were still up, but he didn’t want to engage them in conversation.

Kaze made his way up the steep stairs, almost a ladder, to his room. Next to the folded futon sitting on a shelf was a bundle wrapped in a cloth. Kaze took the bundle and unwrapped it, taking out soft cloths and a small flask of oil. He carefully wiped down his blade, cleaning it. After he had cleaned it to his satisfaction, he took the flask of oil, poured some on a cloth, and coated the blade. He thought of disassembling the handle to clean the tang, but decided he didn’t want to feel vulnerable while his sword was taken apart. He would do that when he had a safer place.

Just as he was sliding the blade back into its scabbard, he heard some footsteps on the stairs.

“
Sumimasen!
Excuse us! May we come up to see you?” It was the voice of the merchant’s wife.

“
Dozo
. Please.” Kaze was curious about what she wanted.

The wife and the maid came up the stairs, entering Kaze’s small room and standing next to the stairwell, looking nervous. They were dressed in plain kimonos, but Kaze realized they were probably the finest kimonos they owned, because they were not patched. Clothes were expensive and were often given as a special present by a lord to a vassal. Most common people had their everyday kimonos patched in some way. Every other day he was in the house, Kaze had noticed the patches on the kimonos of the wife and servant, and he was curious about why they had apparently put on their best kimonos tonight.

“Well?” Kaze asked.

“My husband is still out…” The wife spoke haltingly, then stopped.

“Yes?” Kaze encouraged.

“And, ah, and …”

Kaze was puzzled. The two women looked at each other nervously, then back at Kaze. He smiled, to encourage the wife.

“And …” the wife began, before halting again.

“My mistress wants to say,” the maid broke in, “that we are both grateful for what you did, saving us from the gamblers.”

“Yes?”

“And, ah, and …”

Kaze was losing patience with the wife’s halting explanation. He frowned. The maid saw this and once again broke in.

“Anyway, my mistress and I are so grateful that we want to show our gratitude by giving you a most exciting night.”

“Exciting?” Kaze asked, puzzled.

By way of answer, the maid loosened her kimono sash and shrugged the garment off her shoulders. She was wearing the cloth wrap that served as a foundation garment and underwear beneath. She quickly undid the wrap and let that fall to the floor, too. She stood naked, giving Kaze a nervous smile.

Seeing her maid’s actions, the merchant’s wife did likewise, and in an instant, Kaze was confronted with two nervous and naked women. The wife had an arm across her breast and a hand across her loins, but the maid stood brazenly, looking at Kaze’s reaction.

Kaze’s reaction was surprise. Another surprise on a most surprising night. He was about to speak when he saw the eyes of the wife dart nervously toward the stairs. In an instant, he was on his feet, his sword drawn from its scabbard. He dashed to the stairwell and looked down it. Looking up at him in surprise was an armored samurai, creeping up the stairs, sword in hand, with at least a half-dozen men behind him.

Seeing Kaze, the samurai shouted and charged up the stairs. Kaze allowed him to get his head and shoulders past the top stair. The samurai took a cut at Kaze’s legs with his drawn sword. Kaze dropped his sword blade to block the officer’s blow; then he immediately twisted his blade to the side and thrust the point into one of the few places not protected by the armor, right under the samurai’s chin.

The samurai grabbed at the blade as Kaze withdrew his sword, then immediately collapsed, knocking the two men behind him off the stairs and down on the remaining men on the ground floor.

The wife and maid shrank away from Kaze, snatching up their kimonos and huddling together in a corner of the room. They looked at Kaze with fear, uncertain about what revenge he might take. Instead, Kaze picked up his scabbard and ran to the shuttered window, opening it. Shoving his scabbard into his kimono sash, he started stepping out of the window and onto the tiled roof. Despite the sound of men running up the stairs, he paused before he completely exited the room, looking over his shoulder at the merchant’s wife and the maid.

“It has already been an exciting night,” he said. “You didn’t have to add to it.” Then, he added, “By the way, I would have turned you down.”

T
here was a pale quarter-moon casting long gray shadows when Kaze went out on the roof. He looked down and was surprised to see hordes of soldiers rushing out of nearby houses and running to the vegetable merchant’s house. Evidently the men on the stairs were just the vanguard of a larger party of troops sent to kill or capture him. Kaze surmised that Boss Akinari, unable to collect the ten-thousand-ryo reward, had settled for the thousand for turning him in.

It’s not convenient to be the most wanted man in Edo, Kaze thought as he made his way up the roof and over the peak. He had seen red glows moving with several of the men and he knew that meant they had guns. He wanted to be on the opposite side of the roof from men with matchlock muskets.

Behind him, he could hear the men shouting and passing through the window onto the roof. The houses of Edo were
jammed together, so often two, three, and even four houses had their roofs touching. The roofs were made of board and tile. Because of cost, board was the most popular, but there was talk of the Tokugawas requiring tile roofs, to cut down on fires. Many of the side streets and alleys were so narrow that Kaze thought he could easily jump them.

Kaze had left his sandals at the entry to the merchant’s house, but he still had on his tabi socks and they were slippery on the sloping roof. He almost slid off the roof when he tried to stop and had to put one hand down to maintain his balance. As soon as he regained his equilibrium, he ripped one of the tabi off.