Year of the Demon (36 page)

Daigoro rolled his eyes. “I wonder if Akiko hears me talking too.”

“Ask her when we get back. Do tell me you’ve put this seppuku nonsense out of your mind. In your heart you know it’s not the right way.”

Or else I wouldn’t be fretting about it in my sleep, Daigoro thought. But there would be no returning home. Even if Daigoro survived Kyoto, the Okuma compound could never be home to him again. He would have abandoned his name and his birthright—and not in the way Katsushima thought, either. Obviously he’d gathered all the clues he needed, but he’d reached the wrong conclusion.

“You’re very clever,” Daigoro said, “but not as clever as you think. I’ve no intention of becoming a monk.”

“Oh no?”

“Have you forgotten? The Buddha may say you erase your past karma when you take on the cloth, but Shichio doesn’t forgive so easily. If he did, he’d have no cause to kill the abbot, and you and I would still be in Izu.”

Katsushima nodded sagely, conceding the point. “Are you going to eat that?”

Daigoro looked down at his dinner, which he’d scarcely touched. “I suppose not.”

Katsushima’s chopsticks snatched a nicely grilled tentacle and a slice of pickled daikon. “There is another way, you know. We’re only a few days’ ride from the Kansai. That’s
shinobi
country.”

“Are you serious? Magic men?”

“It’s not magic. They don’t pass through walls; they climb over them, or slip through windows. But they do it so invisibly that people start spinning tall tales. They tell stories of masked men dressed head to toe in black, but only because they do not want to believe that death may hide in plain sight.”

“What are you getting at, Goemon?”

“Shichio cannot stay on his guard against every cook and steward and scribe that crosses his path. A good
shinobi
can become any one of them. Put a few coins in the right hand and we can ride home tomorrow.”

He was right. Daigoro knew it. Given the choice of committing seppuku, facing execution for Shichio’s murder, or placing a hired knife in Shichio’s bedchamber, the easiest road was clear. All Daigoro had to do was compromise his honor and he could ride back home to his wife.

But the easy path was not the path of
bushido
. “No,” he said. “I cannot pay some unknown mercenary to fight my battles for me. My father would never have done such a thing.”

“Your father died at the hands of ‘some unknown mercenary.’”

Katsushima waited to see whether that hit a sore spot. A pang of grief stabbed Daigoro in the heart, but he did not allow it to show in his face. “The Iga are renowned for their spies and assassins,” Katsushima said. “The greatest houses of Kyoto employ them all the time.”

“All the more reason not to hire them. If a man is willing to sell his sword, what keeps him from selling his secrets?”

“The Wind, then. Have you heard of them?”

“No.”

“Then they’ve done their job well. They make clans like the Iga and the Rokkaku look like amateurs. I used to know people who can find them; we can find them again.”

Daigoro looked down at his rice. The cooks he’d grown up with cooked it better. All he had to do was ride north instead of south and he could have that rice again, in a familiar bowl, under a friendly roof. It was true that to hire an assassin was to abandon his father’s path. But if he strayed from the path just this once, just for a little while, he could keep his father’s name. Protect his father’s house. Raise his father’s grandchild and heir.

And be unworthy of that heritage himself.

“I cannot do it,” he said. “What if my
shinobi
should fail? Then I’ll have sullied my honor for nothing.”

“It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?” Katsushima stole another piece of octopus from his bowl. “You know I’m proud of you,
neh
?”

That made Daigoro look up. It was the sort of thing a father would say, and as such, it was the sort of thing Daigoro hadn’t heard in a long time. “Why?” he said. “You thought this was a bad idea from the outset.”

“All the more reason to admire you. You stood up to me—and not just to me. To Hideyoshi, to that idiot Shichio, to the whipping boy he sent to your house, even to that abbot of yours. You haven’t taken so much as a single step from your original position. If I could make your kenjutsu stance as firm as you keep your moral stance, you’d be a fearsome swordsman.”

Daigoro thanked him, but only halfheartedly. He knew he would never be father’s equal in swordsmanship. That much had been fated in the womb, where some curse had emaciated his right leg before he was even born. If he could not match his father’s stature as a warrior, at least he could have done it as a statesman, but he’d botched that too. The only way left to him was to hold fast to his father’s moral principles, but he could not deny that Katsushima had it right from the first: killing the abbot would have spared Daigoro and his family no end of trouble.

Now Daigoro knew of just one solution left to him, and the mere fact that it had entered his mind inspired guilt so strong that he felt it viscerally, like a little sharp-clawed demon crawling around in his gut. His solution would solve all his family’s problems, but he was certain that neither his mother nor his wife would ever forgive him for it.

36

T
hey met the crowds of the big city when they were still thirty
ri
from the city itself. One afternoon, still three days’ ride from Kyoto, the population of the Tokaido suddenly quintupled. By sunset the following day, the foot traffic was so steady that the road itself resembled a tiger, striped with the long shadows of scores upon scores of peasants. By the time they reached Kusatsu the Tokaido was hardly a road anymore, but rather a long and crowded open-air market. Potters and knife sharpeners, greengrocers and fishmongers, singing clowns surrounded by mobs of giggling children; the travelers lacked for nothing—except, Daigoro thought, the scent of the sea, replaced by dust and wood smoke and the musk of oxen. Patrols of Toyotomi samurai were as ubiquitous as the mangy dogs hovering on the edges of every crowd, though of course the samurai were not so thin that Daigoro could count their ribs, and the dogs carried no spears to announce their presence from a hundred paces away.

Not only were the Toyotomi men not looking for Daigoro; they recognized neither his colors nor even the Okuma bear paw, though both were prominently displayed on his breastplate, his
haori
, and his horse’s tack and harness. That was good, Daigoro supposed; it proved his earlier fear of Shichio’s roving assassins was unfounded. Now he wondered whether that too was merely symptomatic of a greater fear, just like his worries about drowning in his
yoroi
.

Never in his life had Daigoro been made to feel so provincial. To be born samurai was to be born into high station—not quite noble born, far short of being born into the Imperial Court, but nevertheless even a newborn samurai inherited a certain aristocracy unknown to the farmers, artisans, and merchants. As such, despite his relief at being unrecognized, Daigoro also felt somewhat insulted. He had always thought of himself as a man of world—or a boy of the world, at the very least. Now, after ten days on the road, he felt like a rube.

And that was before he crossed the bridge into Kyoto itself. He’d always heard Kyoto was cold, and to his embarrassment he’d even packed a quilted jacket among his things. Now he wondered how it could ever get cold here, given the sheer press of human bodies. The Sanjo Ohashi was hardly the longest bridge he and Katsushima had crossed during their ride, but traffic in and out of the city was so dense that Daigoro thought he might just as well make his mare ford the river as wait to cross the bridge like a civilized person. Katsushima only clucked his tongue and said, “Patience.”

Never before had Daigoro seen so many buildings. They were built so close to each other that the monkeys simply hopped from roof to roof. “Can you believe how many temples they have?” said Daigoro. “You could hardly throw a rock without hitting one.”

“Brothels too,” Katsushima said wistfully.

Not ten paces later Daigoro spotted his first southern barbarians. A group of twelve men walked in a block, hands folded and strange round eyes downcast, wearing simple orange robes. Daigoro could not help staring at their sickly pale skin. Their eyes were bizarre, too big, showing too much white. They did not shave their heads properly, but only the pate, like a samurai without his topknot. One of them had hair the same color as Katsushima’s blood bay gelding. Another had curly hair like a sheep.

Fully half the city seemed to be newly built. Homes were packed in cheek by jowl, the shops packed in tighter still. In the space of a single block Daigoro saw three tailors, a cooper, a farrier, a furrier, a cobbler, a carpenter, a papermaker, a signmaker, a cloth dyer, two taverns, two sushi restaurants, four noodle shops, and three inns whose common rooms served food as well. Daigoro wondered what these people did all day to require so much to eat.

There was a whole district for buying produce, still another for buying crabs, lobsters, and other fruit of the sea. Now and then a wheelbarrow would pass, stacked so high with caged poultry or bags of rice that it was impossible to see the man doing the pushing. There were geisha and there were low-class whores. There were leatherworkers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths. There seemed to be no imaginable service Daigoro might ever need that could not be provided for within ten minutes’ walk of where he stood.

At the heart of the commotion was Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s home, the newly built Jurakudai. It wasn’t hard to find; one had only to look for the golden roofs. Daigoro could not begin to guess how many buildings lay within the whitewashed wall that ran the perimeter of the complex. Every one of them was crowned in gold. Even the wall had a little roof of its own, its thousands of curved roof tiles gilded at unthinkable expense. Their circular endcaps shimmered like little suns on the green surface of the moat.

Daigoro had to circumnavigate the complex to find the front door—no short distance, to be sure; the palace was a city quarter unto itself. From every angle he could see the towering three-story keep, whose gabled roofs also shone like solid gold. Daigoro found it garish, but he also found himself second-guessing his every instinct. If riding a hundred-and-some-odd
ri
on the Tokaido hadn’t done the job thoroughly enough, the clamor and alarum of Kyoto had fully impressed on him the fact that he knew nothing of the world beyond his own front door.

Now, dwarfed by the gleaming golden palace before him, he wondered if he’d taken leave of his senses entirely. Was he really so gullible as to think that gaining an audience with the imperial regent was no harder than paying a visit to a family friend? He blushed at his own naïveté. He’d ridden half the length of the empire and now he hadn’t the slightest inkling of what to do next.

And then, impossibly, Mio Yasumasa came out to greet him.

There was no mistaking him. If his snow-white topknot were not enough to identify him, his glittering black breastplate was so big it could almost serve to bard a horse. Mio’s shadow stretched out broad and long behind him as he lumbered through the visitor’s gate. “Young master Okuma! What a strange day this is. That viper Shichio told me I would find you here, and here you are!”

Daigoro looked to the tower standing high atop the keep. It was a viewing deck, not a defensive structure—the walls were no more than lattice—and so Daigoro should have been able to see any observers. The tower was empty.

“How did he know I was here?”

“Eh? You’ll have to speak up, son. Some northern upstart had the gall to cut my ear off.”

Mio made a flourish of cupping a hand to the scar on the left side of his head, and just as Daigoro was about to apologize, the giant let loose a thunderous laugh. Daigoro smiled with him, but he was not in a joking mood. “Please, General, tell me: does Shichio have spies watching for me? How does he know I’m here?”

“It’s that mask of his. Pure devilry, if you ask me.” Mio sneered and spat. “He says it ‘felt you coming’—no, felt your
sword
coming, he said, and if you can make any sense of that, I’ll conscript you on the spot and make you my personal soothsayer. By the Buddha, I could use a clearer view of the future.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shichio. He’s changed. Leave him to his maps and numbers and he can do your army some good, but I campaigned with him for years and never saw him draw a blade. He’s got no stomach for it. But all of a sudden he’s taken to wearing swords. Why? Why now?”

Mio led them into the palace as he spoke, and Daigoro made a careful note of every guardpost, every building, every intersection of lanes. When he and Katsushima tethered their horses, Daigoro memorized every door and window facing the hitching posts. If they needed to make a hasty retreat, he’d need an accurate mental map.

Katsushima was equally on edge. “Is that why you go armored?” he said. “Because you can’t foretell what Shichio might do with his swords?”

Mio looked down at Katsushima—he was that tall—and snorted a laugh through his nose. “Say what’s on your mind,
ronin
.”

“Very well.” Katsushima’s left hand fell to his hip, and with a flick of the thumb he loosened his
katana
in its sheath. “I think a man dressed for battle usually intends to go to battle. So unless fashions have changed since I was last in Kyoto, you’re prepared for a fight.”

Mio noted Katsushima’s hand but made no move for his own weapon. “Maybe I am,” he said, his tone darker than before. “Maybe I always am.” Then he slapped a big hand on his armored belly. “Or maybe I need it to keep my innards from spilling out. Ever since your little friend put his sword in my gut, it hurts every time I bump it into something—and at my size, that happens quite a lot!”

He slapped his breastplate again, laughing mightily at his own joke, then bade Daigoro and Katsushima to follow him past a teahouse and into the garden on the opposite side.