by Steve Bein
But would it sleep? No. So long as he touched it, it haunted him with visions of bloodshed. As soon as he broke contact, it woke a need in him that was so similar to lust that Shichio sometimes felt himself stiffen inside his robes. More than once he’d slipped his hand in there to bring himself off, hoping to satisfy his need for the mask as well. But the mask would not be sated.
So there it was, the only other passenger of the sedan chair. It rested heavily on his thigh, cool to the touch. His thumb ran back and forth, back and forth across the tips of its pointed teeth. Usually it made him think of swords, of thrusting and stabbing, of blood oozing in its soupy, sickening way. Now, though, his thoughts ran to one sword in particular, longest and loveliest of them all. Glorious Victory Unsought, forged by Master Inazuma some four hundred years before, sullied of late by a bear cub’s paws. The mask never relented, not even for the space of a breath, but now it tempted him with the respite he so desperately needed. He had only to claim that sword and the demon would release him.
Never before had it gripped him so firmly. Shichio could not stay in the sedan chair a moment longer. That sword was nearby. It had to be. He had only to get out and claim it. Now.
Then the mask bit him.
He cried out. Before he knew it, the mask was on the floorboard and his thumb was in his mouth. That all-consuming need for the sword vanished in the space of a heartbeat.
He looked at his own blood, which welled up nauseatingly from a long gash across the pad of his thumb. Shichio could not bear the sight of blood. And now his mask was bloody too. A single red pearl clung to the fang cut short by that damnable Bear Cub. The boy’s Inazuma blade had marred the mask, shearing right through solid iron. All the other teeth ended in elegant points, but ironically the pointed ones could not bite. The square-tipped tooth was the sharpest. Not for the first time, it had stolen a taste of Shichio’s flesh.
The sedan chair lurched as the bearers came to a halt. A voice outside said, “General Shichio?”
“Keep going! Mind your own affairs.” Who did this lout think he was? Even if his lord cried out, that was for lesser ears to ignore.
“Sir, we’ve arrived.”
Shichio sucked the blood from his thumb and pressed the cut tightly to the first knuckle of his forefinger. Then he pushed the shade aside. Sunlight raided the shelter of the palanquin. Holding a hand up to shield his eyes, Shichio saw his sergeant kneeling before him, his head bowed so low that Shichio could see the top of his lacquered red helmet. “House Inoue,” the man said.
Beyond him, beyond the column of armored men that answered to him, beyond the gray dust kicked up by their boots, loomed the gatehouse of the Inoue compound. It stood five stories tall, which in Shichio’s estimation was five times taller than it needed to be. These minor daimyo were always trying to outdo one another with embellishments like this, as if architecture alone could make them as lordly as the great houses of Kyoto and Nara. In truth this tower was an eyesore—or so Shichio thought, until he saw the arrow slits ended in small, round cannoniers.
The arrow slits themselves did not surprise him. If a lord saw fit to empty his coffers building such a monstrosity, he might as well give it some degree of defensive value. But Lord Inoue had refitted these ones, boring a round aperture at the bottom of each slit to accommodate the southern barbarian arquebus. The gate itself was not so equipped, but above it, arquebusiers stacked four stories high would decimate any force approaching the castle. Shichio’s agents had forewarned him that this Inoue was paranoid, but Shichio hadn’t expected anything so excessive as this.
No matter, Shichio thought. A man this fearful could well imagine the consequences if he were to gun down an advisor to Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In public, Hideyoshi was the most powerful daimyo the empire had ever seen. Behind closed doors, he and Shichio were lovers. Shichio called him Hashiba, a pet name no one else was allowed to use, and he earned that right with a tongue more talented than a Gion courtesan’s. Inoue would know nothing of Shichio’s illicit affair with Hashiba, but he had to know Toyotomi Hideyoshi would never stand for the assassination of one of his generals. Train as many arquebuses on me as you like, Shichio thought. Pretend they will protect you. I know the truth.
He had only to clear his throat and his sergeant sprang to his feet. As Shichio stepped out of the sedan chair, the sergeant dashed to the front of the column. In a voice that would shake rain from the clouds, he bellowed, “General Shichio, emissary of the Imperial Regent and Chief Minister, the great Lord General Toyotomi no Hideyoshi, demands to see Inoue Izu-no-kami Shigekazu!”
Immediately bars went into motion inside the gate, and soon enough the heavy gates began to open. How petty, Shichio thought. Inoue had manned the gates well before Shichio’s company arrived. He’d left them barred just to show everyone that he could. Shichio marched with only twenty men—well, twenty armored samurai; the four palanquin bearers hardly counted as men, though they could serve as arrow shields in a pinch. But twenty men posed no threat to a fortified compound, and Lord Inoue wanted to remind him of that.
Shichio entered the compound with his troops in lockstep behind him. Two long rows of Inoue samurai awaited him. They wore black trimmed with silver. Each man wore a banner pole on his back, and each black banner displayed the white sparrow of House Inoue. The sparrows did no flying today; the banners hung limp in the dead air.
Inoue Shigekazu, Lord Protector of Izu, was a tiny man. Like his house colors, his hair was black with thin highlights of silver. If Shichio’s agents heard it true, the eight personal bodyguards at his back were all his sons. But eight bodyguards and a host of samurai were not enough to put Lord Inoue at ease. Even from this distance Shichio could see his eyes darting this way and that, as jumpy as the little sparrows that his forefathers had taken as the symbol of their house.
The nine Inoues stood under the eaves of the largest building in the compound, a sprawling two-story great hall that still seemed like a squat, flat toad compared to the towering gatehouse. Shichio approached them with a swagger, the better to put the silly little lord on his heels. He knew the Inoues outnumbered his men at least three to one, but Shichio’s were battle-hardened veterans, tested by fire and steel. Izu was untouched by the wars, so Inoue’s samurai were stage actors by comparison. Shichio knew that Inoue knew that too.
“General Shichio,” Lord Inoue said, “to what do we owe the honor of your visit?”
“The Bear Cub,” Shichio said. “Daigoro. Formerly Okuma Daigoro. Formerly Lord Protector of Izu.”
“Formerly my daughter’s husband.” Inoue’s face soured. “What of him?”
“I want his head.”
That brought a twinkle to Inoue’s eye. “Then let us sit down to tea. I predict a fast friendship between us.”
*
Soon enough Inoue had water boys attending to Shichio’s troops and silk-clad maidservants pouring cold mugi-cha for the lords. “Such a pity that you want the young man’s head,” Inoue said, smoothing his thin mustache. “I had my heart set on the same prize.”
“Keep it, then. I’ll accept that magnificent sword of his as proof of his death.”
Inoue smiled and raised his cup. “A fair compromise. I have no use for swords.”
“Nor of heads, I hope.”
He said it with the slightest hint of sexual innuendo, to see how Inoue would react. A petty lordling might take it as a jape at his own expense. A prude might take it as an accusation of deviant practices with the dead. Shichio wanted to know what sort of man he was dealing with.
Inoue just tittered. “For that head I would find a use. As a chamber pot, perhaps. But speaking of swords, I must warn you, I think you do not travel with enough of your own.”
His eyes flicked toward Shichio’s men, who kneeled in ordered rows on the shaded veranda. They had all received bamboo cups, and skinny boys in finespun cotton moved among them carrying ladles of water. The water was backlit by the westering sun, and it caught the light quite be
autifully as it spilled from ladle to cup.
Shichio followed Inoue’s gaze to the gatehouse, also backlit, with more arrow slits and cannoniers facing the courtyard. From this side he could see pinholes of sunlight through some of them—some, but not all. Shichio did not think that detail was important until he saw a shifting shadow blot out one of the pinholes.
“Not enough swords,” he mused. “Shall I take that as a threat? Yes, perhaps I will. How many soldiers have you hidden in that grotesque tower of yours, lurking behind those cannoniers? Tell me, is there an arquebus trained on me as we speak? Do you think your good karma will outweigh the bad if you wait until my thirsty men have drunk of your water before you gun them down?”
Again he studied the little daimyo’s reaction. If House Inoue still counted the Bear Cub among its allies, now might be the moment he ordered his arquebusiers to fire. If Lord Inoue was smart enough not to bring the wrath of Toyotomi Hideyoshi on his house, he might still be in league with the Bear Cub, in which case his face might betray some sign of his repressed desire to kill Shichio and his men. At a minimum, he should exhibit some small degree of shame in threatening his guests.
But Inoue was inscrutable. “My lord, you misunderstand me. Why should I threaten you?”
“Because the Bear Cub is your son-in-law.”
“Was. Now he is a vagabond. But that is why I caution you. The boy has nothing to lose. He slew fifty at the Green Cliff, my lord. Your twenty swords are not enough.”
“Fifty!” Shichio clucked his tongue as if chiding a schoolboy who did not know his sums. “I have heard that rumor. And others. His sword fells three men in a single blow. He drinks poison as other men drink sake. He commandeered a frigate single-handed, and now he rides the waves as a pirate king. Shall I tell you stories of dragons and tengu next?”
“My lord, do you mean to tell me the fifty are a myth?”
Shichio gave him a tiny smile. Inoue was the very picture of befuddlement. He had more spies than any man in Izu. Not much of an accomplishment, but still, the Green Cliff was only a few dozen ri from where he sat. Surely his spies could not have bollixed the tale completely. And he was well aware that Shichio should have known every detail. After all, it was his fifty that fell.
“Not a myth,” Shichio said, “but not the whole truth. Fifty men, the whole garrison, all slaughtered in the night. That much is true. But do you honestly believe the whelp acted alone? No. He hired shinobi from the Kansai. Hordes of them. Even assassins of the Wind. And his retainer was with him, a shabby ronin but a fell hand with a blade.”
Inoue nodded. “Katsushima Goemon. I know the man. Shabby, as you say, but quick as a snake. My eyes and ears tell me the two still travel together. All the more reason for you to travel in force, my lord. It would not do for a man of your station to be cut down on the road.”
Shichio sipped from his teacup to conceal his dismay. I have no station, he thought, and you know that damn well. All of my wedding guests know it.
Everything had been arranged: Shichio would marry the Bear Cub’s mother, Lady Okuma Yumiko. That would give him control of House Okuma’s troops, who knew the Izu Peninsula better than any of Shichio’s men. They would hunt down the Bear Cub. In the meantime, Shichio—now become Lord Okuma Izu-no-kami Shichio—would lay claim to name, rank, title, and station. He would leave his peasant blood behind him for good and all.
He had no love for the samurai. In truth, the prospect of becoming one of them chafed a little. As far as Shichio was concerned, the samurai were the source of every trouble in these islands, but as Hashiba’s chief quartermaster he had no choice but to serve with them. He had no patience for their disrespect, and becoming samurai himself would bring an end to that.
Instead, what followed was the most embarrassing incident of Shichio’s life. He’d known in advance that Lady Okuma was quite mad. As it happened, that suited his plans perfectly. He wanted to be a lord, not a husband, and he certainly had no intention of staying in Izu. His home was in Kyoto, at Hashiba’s side. But little did he imagine how deep the woman’s lunacy ran. She rebuffed him to marry an infant—an infant!—and Shichio was left empty-handed.
Now rumors crawled across the countryside like a plague of rats. Shichio, of such lowly stock that even a madwoman would not have him. Shichio, whose betrothed cast him out of the marriage bed when she saw his cock was smaller than a newborn’s. Shichio, who challenged a half-dead cripple to single combat, then fled the field the moment the cripple set his hand on his sword.
The mere thought of it flushed Shichio’s ears and cheeks and made them burn. Of course he’d backed away. What choice did he have? Crossing swords with the Bear Cub was suicide. This was the boy who bested Mio Yasumasa—Mount Mio, as some of the men used to call him. Mio was a titan. If even he could not stand before that Inazuma blade, Shichio had no chance.
Embarrassing as they were, the stories of his wedding paled in comparison to the one the whelp had yet to let off the chain. Daigoro knew Shichio’s darkest secret, the one that took place at the Battle of Komaki. That story would cause Shichio not to lose face but to lose his head. And what vexed him most was that not a single word of that rumor had reached his ears. He had no doubt that this plague of wedding gossip was just cover, deliberately released by the Bear Cub in order to mask that fatal shot. Shichio had exhausted his resources deploying additional spies to track down the rumormongers. He would prefer to have had these agents riding at his side, armed and ready to take on the Bear Cub in the event of an ambush. But no. He’d deployed them all, not to quash the wedding stories but to keep that deadliest secret from reaching the wrong ears.
Yet no one had heard a single whisper of that rumor. There were only two explanations: either all of his spies were incompetent, or else the whelp had kept the story to himself. But why would he? He had nothing left to lose. Shichio had dispatched not just spies but also mercenaries—“bear hunters,” as they had come to be called—and Daigoro’s best defense against them was to see Shichio dead. So why hadn’t he loosed the one arrow that would put Shichio in the grave? Or if he had, why had none of Shichio’s agents caught wind of it?
That was a worry for a later time. At the moment, there was Inoue’s comment about Shichio’s “station” to deal with. It was ingratiating and insulting at once. Shichio had no surname, as Inoue well knew. His own daughter had been front and center during Shichio’s wedding fiasco. Shichio remembered her all too well: her smile had been the biggest of all when Shichio backed down. Some day soon, Shichio meant to kill her, preferably with the Bear Cub as his captive audience. But it would not do to tell her father that. Instead Shichio said, “Tell me, why should you want this boy dead? You allowed him to marry your daughter, neh?”
“I did. A damned cripple, and I even gave him my blessing.” Those beady black eyes finally stood still, matching Shichio’s gaze and glowing with a murderous light. “He got her with child, then abandoned her. He even abandoned his own name. What sort of man does that, I ask you? Now my Akiko is an Okuma, not an Inoue. There is nothing I can do about it. And no sooner did she step from my ship onto that one than the Okuma ship started to sink.”
“Oh?”
“Of course! Its lady is a lunatic and its lord needs a wet nurse.”
Shichio hardly needed the reminder. He’d asked his question hoping for something juicier. He’d received a report that the Okumas faced some kind of financial difficulty, but he had yet to confirm it. “How poorly run is this ship? Do you have ears within their walls?”
“Of course.”
“Then I think you know what I’ll ask next. Is the Bear Cub hiding there or is he not?”
“No. But you know that already, General. Your garrison still stands outside the Okuma compound.”
“Yes it does, doesn’t it? But you see, Lord Inoue, this puts you in a difficult position. You are Izu’s greatest spymaster, are you not?”
Inoue’s beady eyes twinkled. “I am.”
“Th
en you know I have searched Izu from top to bottom. I’ve lost count of how many bear-hunting parties I’ve sent into the wilds. Not one of my men has laid eyes on the whelp, and there is only one place we have not yet looked: your own home.”
Inoue stiffened. His eyes flitted here and there as if an assassin might pop out from any corner. “General Shichio, why would I assist the boy I hate most in the world?”
“Why indeed?” He let the question hang in the air for a moment, and let the little man wonder if Shichio meant to have his answer by tearing the compound apart. “Well, of course you wouldn’t, would you? Harboring a fugitive is a crime. But then where is the Bear Cub? I have agents on every road, in every port, at every checkpoint. They swear he has not slipped them by. Have they lied to me?”
“Lied? I think not. But there is more to Izu than ports and checkpoints.”
“Obviously.” Shichio was not stupid. He knew the difference between the fiction illustrated on a map and the truth laid out by the land.
Inoue paled at Shichio’s tone. “A thousand apologies, my lord. Suffice it to say that I have eyes and ears everywhere, and all of them are out bear hunting. If Daigoro is in Izu, my people will find him.”
“And if he attempts to leave, mine will find him.” Shichio smiled thinly. “I shall send you his head, along with my compliments, if you give me your word as a samurai to reciprocate.”
“I swear it,” Inoue said, and Shichio knew he had him. These samurai were bullies and butchers, but deadly serious when it came to their honor. They would sooner die in a duel than suffer being called a liar. “Glorious Victory is yours, as soon as I take it from the boy’s dead hands.”
Shichio smirked and finished his tea. “Send me the hands too.”