by Nick Lake
Yukiko looked up, and Taro took a step back. Her face when it turned to him was twisted by anger, her eyes narrowed to predatory slits. He barely recognized her.
“You killed my sister,” she said, her voice devoid of any apparent emotion—something that was worse than if she had spoken through tears, or a throat choked with wracking grief.
Taro stared at her. “I d-d-didn’t.”
Shusaku stroked the girl’s hair. “Taro didn’t kill her. Kenji Kira did.”
“Kenji Kira works for Lord Oda. Lord Oda wants Taro dead. Therefore it is Taro’s fault that Heiko died.” She glared at Taro. “I wish you had never come to our house! You have destroyed everything. The abbess. My sister. What else would you take from me?”
Taro felt his knees weakening. “I didn’t mean … She … Your sister surprised me. I couldn’t stop her from leaving the cart.”
“Then why didn’t you save her?” she hissed.
“I was … I told you, I couldn’t move.”
“You moved for Little Kawabata. You saved him. Afterward—after she was dead—you could have turned her.” It was as if she were tearing the words from her throat. Taro half-expected them to come out covered in blood, and drip down her cloak.
“I tried,” said Taro. “I wanted to, but she’d drugged me. She drugged you. She knew what she was doing. I wish …”
He began to cry.
Shusaku stroked Yukiko’s hair. “Even if he had been able to get out of the cart, they’d cut off her head. He could not have done for her what he did for Little Kawabata. And this is assuming that the samurai had not killed him, which they would have, for sure. There were too many of them.”
“So you say,” said Yukiko. Her face was as white as the snow that gave her her name. “Perhaps Taro merely felt that Heiko was less important than becoming shogun.”
“She did it for honor!” said Taro. “She said I had to kill Oda and become shogun! That I had to tell you she had died in steel and in honor!”
Only then did Yukiko’s features soften. A tear traced the contour of her cheek. “Perhaps. That sounds like her.”
She turned back to her sister, touched her head, where it lay separated from the body. Then she looked up, a troubled squall of emotions raging on her face—sympathy, anger, shock.
“That man,” she said to Shusaku. “Who killed my sister. He works for Lord Oda?”
Shusaku nodded.
“Then I will accompany Taro on the mission. I’m not a vampire. I can go abroad in daylight. I will help him to kill Oda, and if I see this man who laid low my sister, I will kill him, too. Do you understand?”
Shusaku placed his hands together in the gassho mudra, as if to underline the seriousness of his words. “Yes. You shall go with him.”
CHAPTER 62
As they continued toward Lord Oda’s castle, Yukiko remained quiet, withdrawn—her features seeming drained of blood and life. They had abandoned the cart, of course, and now they made slow progress, skirting the road to walk through the limited cover of the rice fields, and the occasional tree. Yukiko walked among them like a pale ghost.
On the road, which they kept always in sight, few travelers passed. The land seemed benighted, exhausted, and even the frogs and birds called with weak voices. Aside from the odd peasant hurrying home, they passed only one larger group, a sorry collection of eta, the tattered rags they wore almost indistinguishable from their sore-ridden skin, carrying what Taro presumed to be bundles of leather, to sell to the samurai of Nagoya.
It was only when they drew close to the castle that Taro saw the bridge over the river and remembered the checkpoint. He pointed it out to Shusaku, and the ninja grimaced.
“I had hoped to think of something by now,” he said.
Hiro was looking at the ninja suspiciously. “I’m not pretending to be a leper again,” he said.
Yukiko stared blankly at the guards. “We could just kill them,” she said, her voice flat. Looking at her, Taro felt guilty and ashamed. Heiko had died for him, though he hadn’t asked it of her. She believed that he would be shogun, that he would bring low those men who had wreaked so much devastation on the land—Lord Oda, Kenji Kira.
But what if he couldn’t? Then she would have died in vain.
Taro looked away from her, his face burning. He had left Heiko and Yukiko once, crept away in the night so that they would be safe. And what had he achieved? Only the death of their foster mother, and the destruction now of Heiko, who had believed of all the stupid things that she’d been sacrificing herself for him.
Whatever I do, he thought, I will always bring pain and death to those around me. Even when I try to avoid it.
A tear spilled onto his cheek.
When he looked up again, Shusaku was indicating the guards at the bridge with his hand.
“There are too many of them,” said Shusaku. “We’d be killed.”
Yukiko shrugged, as if that was a matter of little consequence.
If anything, the samurai presence on either side of the bridge had been increased, and Taro could see the fires of other encampments at regular intervals along the river, so as to stop clandestine crossings by boat, or by swimming. He cursed. They could see Lord Oda’s castle now, its four towers rising sharply into the night sky, as if to bite the heavens. Yet this checkpoint stood in their way.
But what Hiro had said was tickling at the back of his mind.
“That thing, with the finger,” he said, thinking out loud. “It was clever, because no one wants to touch a leper. But also because no one would be fool enough to dishonor themselves by disguising themselves as a leper. So the samurai didn’t expect it.”
“I was tricked into it!” said Hiro, wounded at being called a fool. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I know,” said Taro. “What I mean is that the disguise was powerful because to impersonate a leper is literally unthinkable. We know how much the samurai cling to their honor, even if their lords exploit it. It would never have even entered their minds that a person might pretend to have leprosy, might deliberately throw away their honor like that.”
Shusaku was nodding. “Yes. You’re right. Did you notice, when we saw Kenji Kira kill that peasant in the mountains? He asked if the man had seen two boys and a man, and he said that one of the boys was a leper. Even he, with all his experience of lies and interrogation, was influenced by his samurai preconceptions. It didn’t occur to him that the leprosy might be faked.”
Yukiko turned her dull eyes on the pair of them. “So?”
Taro took a deep breath, hardly able to believe he was about to say this. But he’d learned a lot about honor, hadn’t he? He’d learned that an idea—such as loyalty—is only an idea. It is the behavior of the individual that counts. A person could talk grandly about loyalty without possessing as much of it, even in his most self-indulgent daydreams, as Hiro.
Shame, too, was only an idea. If humiliation had to be endured in order to achieve something great, then wasn’t the humiliation only a step in the journey, an obstacle to be overcome? If shaming himself was the price he had to pay to avenge his father, then so be it.
“Back there,” he said, watching his companions’ eyes anxiously to gauge their reactions, “we passed a group of eta.”
CHAPTER 63
Taro adjusted the rope belt around his ragged cloak, and picked up a bundle of leather. At the bottom of the bundle, hidden beneath the skins, were his short-sword, ninja clothes, and other sundry weapons. The boy before him wore Taro’s clothes, and such was the closeness in age between them that Taro had the uncomfortable sensation of looking into a glass.
“Thank you,” said Taro. “It fits well.”
Shusaku had spent his remaining gold coins buying not only the leather the eta carried, but also the clothes from their backs. Four of them, including the boy of Taro’s age, were now outfitted in clothes that, despite being peasant garb, were still elegant in comparison to the etas’ patchwork rags. Yukiko, Hiro, and Shusaku w
ore cloaks as stained and torn as Taro’s.
Taro had expected that Yukiko might object to the plan, but she had only nodded silently, and now she stood unflinching in the rough raiment of an untouchable, her eyes on the road before them, thinking, no doubt, of her sister. Taro could almost admire her single-minded focus on revenge, though he wished that she would not stand and stare like that, without saying anything. It made him think of a statue.
Now the boy in front of Taro gave a little bow. “We will return to the mountains, then,” he said.
“And forget you ever saw us,” said Shusaku.
One of the older eta grinned, revealing a handful of black teeth. “For this gold, we’d forget our names,” he said. He gestured to the boy whose clothes Taro wore. “Come, Junichiro. Let’s go.”
The boy smiled nervously at Taro, then turned and began to walk away. “Good-bye,” he called behind him.
The idea of bowing to an eta was unthinkable, but then so was the idea of outfitting oneself in their clothes. Taro bowed slightly, and was rewarded by a surprised grin from the boy, who also bobbed his head in a bow as he ran to join the other eta. Taro felt something like a tugging as the boy departed, almost as if the two of them were joined by some invisible filament, and he pursed his lips. The boy was eta, and unknown to him, and thus by rights should mean nothing.
But Taro had the inexplicable sense that their fates were in some way intertwined.
Shusaku called for him to hurry, and he shook his head. He must have been imagining things.
As Taro had expected, the disguise worked perfectly. So blasphemous and repugnant to the ideals of the samurai was the race of the eta, let alone the notion that anyone might seek to be seen as one, that the guards gave no more than a cursory glance at the four companions crossing the bridge, bags of leather slung on their backs, before they returned to searching the rice sacks of emaciated peasants, as if assassins might be found contorted within them.
Shusaku had rubbed dark river mud all over his face, and though in fact the eta from whom they had bought the clothes had been clean-skinned, the dirt that obscured his tattoos accorded so well with the samurai’s opinion of what an eta should look like, that it drew no attention or remark.
Taro was learning something new about ninja. He had thought of them as peerless men of action, achieving their ends through skill and grace of movement, roaming the land in their distinctive black clothes. Now he realized that the true effectiveness of a ninja lay often in not appearing to be one.
That, and they weren’t all men.
Yes. Openly walking across a heavily guarded bridge at night, their weapons slung casually over their backs in bags that, had they been searched, would have immediately betrayed their bearers—that was what it meant to be a ninja.
Taro’s heart was pounding in his chest as they stepped off the bridge and onto the road that led between Nagoya’s houses, and he knew that his pulse sped not only in fear of being caught, but also in excitement. He saw Hiro’s glittering eyes and knew that his friend was feeling a similar mixture of emotions.
That night they followed directions given by the town’s lowlifes—it was impossible, dressed as an eta, to engage with anyone of any stature—to a squalid inn in the poor part of town, and there they formulated a plan of action. The next morning, Shusaku would lie low inside—the sun would kill him if he ventured out. Taro and Yukiko would make their move at dawn, when enough of the gray of night remained to conceal them from casual view but the sun’s light was bright enough to deter any other ninja from action.
They would head for the back wall of the castle, which, according to the map Shusaku drew in the dust of the room’s grimy floor, led to a courtyard and from there to the tower where their target was to be found.
But it wasn’t going to be easy.
From a quick reconnaissance it had become clear that there were guards posted all around the castle walls in such a way as to cover, among them, the entire approach to the castle. Behind them, forming a second cordon, was a moat that reached right up to the castle walls.
This was where Hiro came in. Working with Taro, he would create a diversion that would draw one of these guards away from his position—hopefully permanently, but at the least for long enough to allow Taro and Yukiko to swim the moat and scale the wall to drop down into the courtyard. From there they could easily cross to the fourth tower and ascend to the room at the top.
Shusaku guessed that Oda feared a ninja attack most of all. As a result, he would be relying on the services of Namae to keep him safe. The tower itself would not be heavily guarded by day—in theory, anyway. Taro and Yukiko would climb up the wall to the top room. There, Taro would kill Lord Oda before fighting his way down to the courtyard with Yukiko’s help, using the advantage of height over their opponents. Anyone coming up the spiral staircase would be hampered by its clockwise twist, unable to properly wield their weapon in their right hand.
And if they encountered Kenji Kira, Yukiko would take his life, in exchange for Heiko’s.
Parts of the plan even worked.
CHAPTER 64
Taro, Yukiko, and Hiro were glad when they were able to leave the filthy inn as the first gray light of dawn showed on the horizon—though looking at his companions’ faces, Taro guessed that they were as nervous as he was.
Taro was dressed in black hakama trousers. He wore hard shoes with sharp spikes at their tips—perfect for finding purchase between the bricks of a tower wall. In a soft linen bag on his back were another pair of hard shoes, these ones equipped with a stamp on the bottom that would turn Taro’s shoe prints—as he left the area after swimming back across the moat—into the webbed footprints of geese.
Also in his bag: a short wakizashi sword, a dagger, and a blowpipe, along with the black mask scarves that he would don as soon as he and Yukiko began their assault on the wall. The masks were not just for disguise. In the half-light, they would conceal their wearer against the darkness of the castle wall.
Walking quickly, they drew closer to the castle. They did not speak unless they had to. Yukiko remained cold and distant, hiding within the cool ivory carapace of her grief. Hiro was uncharacteristically silent, whirling suspiciously at every little noise.
Finally they reached the circular street that abutted practically onto the castle walls, running around the edge of the moat. Thatched-roof houses clustered here by the dark, cold moat, many of them using it as both a water source and a latrine—two somewhat incompatible uses that explained the poor health of many of the town’s inhabitants.
The early morning was cold, and Taro’s breath misted before him as he skirted the backs of the houses, following the moat. A couple of times he heard noises behind them—soft noises that could have been made by shoes on mud. Hiro and Yukiko too occasionally glanced behind suddenly.
“What was that?” Hiro whispered, as a splash caught their attention.
They stopped dead.
Then a duck appeared, floating serenely on the moat. Taro let out a breath. “Let’s go.”
Yet still that feeling remained.
Taro saw nothing, but he felt the urgent prickle on the back of his neck, the raising of the little hairs there, that warned of someone watching. But who could be following them? He forced his heart rate and breathing to slow. He was nervous, yes, but also excited. The time had finally come to wreak revenge on his adopted father’s killer, on the man who had tried to have him destroyed, purely in the name of power.
Eventually they came to the place where he could see a drawbridge raised against the castle wall. Shusaku had told him that this could be lowered when someone wanted to take one of the horses out from the stable, though no one had done so in some time, due to the heightened security in the castle. On the bank opposite the castle stood a guard—from here just a dark figure in the embracing darkness, though the reddening light of dawn caught the metal of his sword, making it shine like a beacon, or a talisman against evil spirits.
But right now Taro was the spirit. And a sword wasn’t going to stop him.
This was the section of the wall they would climb. Looking up at its height now, Taro had to fight a wave of nauseous terror as his confidence of only a moment earlier dissipated. It was too high. There was no way they were going to get up there, and then to get past any guards and fight his way to Lord Oda, it was just—
But Hiro put a hand on his shoulder, and smiled at him, and Taro looked again at the wall and it seemed to have diminished in size. He was glad his friend was with him. Perhaps all of this was meant. Perhaps it had been not only coincidence that Taro had been on the beach when Hiro and his parents were attacked by the mako; perhaps all of this had been fated from the beginning, as the abbess had claimed, and now everything was coming together in the same way that the first few hesitant notes strummed on a biwa slowly rose to form chords, melody, and soaring structure.
I hope I can climb that thing, thought Taro. The wall seemed once again impossibly tall, and slick from moat water, and lacking in such things as conveniently jutting bricks with which to hold on and pull oneself up.
But they were drawing near to the guard now, who stood in full samurai armor before the moat, and there was no more time for thinking. Hiro fell back, stepping into the overhang of a shop’s roof, and so as the guard turned to see Taro and Yukiko approach, he saw only a young couple out for an early morning stroll. Yukiko’s hair was pinned up in the manner of a wealthy geisha, and Shusaku had procured for Taro an embroidered jacket that made him appear a dissolute young dandy.
As expected, the guard barely acknowledged them. They were the kind of wastrels that flourished in a town overseen by an amoral lord, and they were of no consequence.
But then rapid movement from behind the couple caught the guard’s eyes, and he whipped his head round as Hiro came running up to Taro. Hiro bashed Taro on the head with a stick, grabbed his bag, and continued running, turning onto one of the narrow side streets. “Thief!” screamed Yukiko.