by Steve Bein
“My lady is most generous. But Toyotomi-dono, I have given much thought to what some of the officers have been saying. Is it proper for a man of my station to take on his wife’s name in marriage? I am a general after all—”
“But willing to marry Lady Okuma,” Nene said. “Is that not so?”
“It was,” Shichio admitted. He hoped he’d said it without too much of a hiss.
“Aha,” she said. “Is the problem that House Okuma is too small a name for one of my honored husband’s favorite generals? The name Urakami is not so small. They are cousins to House Oda, who are cousins to my own house of Sugaihara. Their shadow stretches back over many hundreds of years.”
Damn this woman, Shichio thought. She’s foreseen my every move. He tried to keep his frustration off his face, with only moderate success. “My lady, I know this sort of concern seems trivial to you. You married a man of common descent despite your own samurai lineage. I daresay that was most foresightful of you, but also most unorthodox. And your husband did not take your name; he forged a name for himself, in the eyes of the emperor and all men.”
“Then can you not do the same?”
That got Shichio’s hackles up, but again he stifled that reaction before it reached his face. “I humbly serve in whatever capacity my lord general asks of me. I do not aspire to follow in his footsteps.”
Nene inclined her head and smiled. It was a tiny movement, but it spoke volumes. Well played, she was telling him. “You have it right. The emperor will not raise you up. But honored husband, is it perhaps within your power … ?”
Hashiba turned to her, a quizzical frown crinkling his simian features. “What are you after, Nene?”
She bowed her head, the very picture of a submissive wife. “When Mio Yasumasa passed, you lost a long-serving hatamoto. Now I understand one who is not samurai can never be hatamoto, but perhaps in this case … well, General Shichio has been a most loyal servant, neh? Is there no way to reward his devotion?”
Hashiba smiled, revealing those sharp, jagged teeth again. It was little wonder that his enemies called him the Monkey King. Even the great Mio Yasumasa called him that, though only after he’d poured a bottle of whisky into that prodigious belly of his. Shichio still had nightmares about Mio’s death. Those rubbery slabs of flesh flopping to the floor like fish … the thought alone was almost enough to make him retch. Shichio would never regret killing him, but he was horrified at the way he’d done it—or rather, at the way the mask made him do it.
Mio had been hatamoto, the highest-ranking bannerman in a daimyo’s service. As Hashiba was the most powerful man in the empire, his hatamoto were the elite of the elite. It was an honor Shichio could not turn down, a fact Nene understood all too well. He could see every step plotted before him, like a condemned man walking to the execution ground. Nene had laid the path. Is it perhaps within your power, she’d said, directing Hashiba to wonder if there was anything he could not do. Is there no way to reward his devotion, she’d asked, making him think about the limits of his largesse. Shichio knew all of her tricks, because they were his tricks too.
Inevitably, Hashiba got to his feet, making himself feel larger. He flicked his hand as if swatting at a mosquito. “If only samurai can be hatamoto, then I will make him samurai. Shichio, kneel before me.”
Dreading what was to come, Shichio did as he was told. Nene stood beside her husband, making it perfectly clear that she stood above Shichio as well. Hashiba removed his wakizashi from his belt, and with great ceremony he presented it to Shichio. Shichio had no choice but to accept it in both hands, and to push it through his own belt where a samurai would wear it. His katana came next. As they performed this exchange of arms, Hideyoshi gave his benediction. “Shichio, I hereby name you samurai, as shall be all your heirs forever more. I leave it to you to choose your surname and your crest, which all shall honor. I also name you hatamoto, and I bestow upon you mine own arms, as badges of your honored station. Now swear your fealty to me, to my house, and to the emperor, may Amaterasu protect and preserve him.”
By the gods, Shichio thought, he can be quite officious when he sets his mind to it. He wondered whether this too was Nene’s doing. She was of samurai blood, from House Sugaihara far to the south; ritualism ran in her veins. Shichio despised three things above all others: sweat, ugliness, and the samurai class. The emperor might have ruled in name, but it was the samurai who struck fear into the heart of every peasant. The whole point of Hashiba’s rulership, the reason Shichio supported him in the first place, was that if one man could bring the empire to heel, that would spell the end of war. Without war, there would be no warrior caste. And now Shichio was to join that caste for good and all. He would have their respect, at the cost of his own self-respect.
Shichio pressed his forehead almost to the dust. Then he realized Nene would notice if he fell short of full submission when he accepted this great honor, and so he touched his sweating brow to the ground. He swore his oath, and Toyotomi no Hideyoshi, Imperial Regent and Chief Minister, bade him rise. Again Shichio could only do as he was told, mud-streaked forehead and all.
The pageantry was far from over. An adjutant vanished through a long slit in the fabric wall, returning soon afterward with Hashiba’s barber. Shichio had given little thought to this aspect of his supposed promotion. As if wearing the twin swords was not ugly enough, now he had to part with his beautiful hair. Other men might feel their hearts race at the approach of a wrathful samurai; Shichio’s heart quivered as the barber’s razor robbed him of all the hair atop his head. Topknot be damned, and damn the honors that came with it too; Shichio was doomed to go the rest of his life as a man balding before his time.
But what choice did he have? More pointedly, what choice had Nene left him? He could not turn down land, rank, and station. Originally he’d sought it in order to stay by Hashiba’s side. Now Nene had shackled him to this fishing village in the barbarian north. If he could swiftly get a son on this Urakami woman, would that be enough to free him? Was she even of childbearing years? Could he leave her to govern in his stead? The Bear Cub would be dead before the year was out. Once the whelp was gone, Shichio had no intention of spending the rest of his life languishing in obscurity. Somehow he had to find his way back to Kyoto. To Hashiba. And with any luck, to a shinobi who would take a bit of gold in exchange for putting a knife in Nene’s ice-cold heart.
At least the barber was good enough to wash the mud from Shichio’s brow. Then the highest-ranking officers came to call, and Shichio had to endure congratulations from all of them. They complimented the noble lineage of his swords and made the requisite jokes about the tan line left where his hairline once met his forehead. Shichio smiled and nodded and made many awkward bows, second-guessing himself about the level to which he ought to lower his head, given his new standing.
Dinner came as a welcome relief. The beef was exquisite, just as Hashiba had promised. Nene’s chief cook also served fugu, which he’d somehow delivered all the way from the Ryukyu Islands. Its poison brought a pointed spice to the sashimi that nothing else could match. Hashiba joked that the fugu alone was a good enough reason to conquer Shikoku and Kyushu. These were among his most recent conquests, and the gathering drank many rounds of sake in toasts to their swift defeat.
After dinner and drinks came the shamisen and shakuhachi, and Hashiba’s deplorable singing. Shichio, quite drunk, excused himself to have a piss and slipped outside. Then he found he really did have to piss, and after he’d relieved himself, he came back to find Nene outside the enclosure. She was waiting for him.
The long fabric wall luffed lazily in the breeze, but her cloth-of-gold kimono did not move at all. Even her hair remained undisturbed, which struck him as eerie; a ghost’s hair was said not to move in the breeze either. On another level it made him miss his own thick, luxuriant hair.
Nene dipped her head in a tiny bow. “Shichio-san. You’ve conducted yourself with grace tonight.”
“How could
I not? You have bestowed such lofty honors on me.” He made little effort to conceal his vitriol.
“I? Surely you mean my husband.”
“I most surely do not.”
“Then you’ve lost none of your cleverness.” She bowed again, deeper than the last time. Shichio didn’t miss the subtext: she respected the ability if not the man. “I was glad to see you accept the gift in the spirit in which it was given.”
“Oh, quite. I will be the only hatamoto within a hundred ri. And a hundred and fifty ri away from anything that matters.”
Nene allowed herself the faintest ghost of a smile. It put not a single wrinkle in her white face paint. “You do not yet know of my greatest gift to you,” she said. With a pale and slender hand she removed a sheet of fine paper from her sleeve, ornately folded to make a perfect square. The wax seal was broken. In the dim light Shichio could not make out whose seal it was, but it hardly mattered. Regardless of who penned the letter, its content would spell Shichio’s death.
“You intercepted one such letter,” she said. “One and only one. What you do not know is that you received it only because I released it to you. My spies have intercepted the rest. I know all about your failure in the Battle of Komaki. I know you are responsible for my husband’s most public shame. But more importantly for you, my honored husband knows not a word of it.”
If the letter set his heart to racing, Nene nearly caused it to stop dead. “What? Why?”
“You will accept my gifts. Land. Lordship. Wealth. Esteem. And above all, quietude. Retire to your new estate and never return to the capital. If I see you there again, if I hear you have even pointed your horse in Kyoto’s direction, my honored husband will hear of your treachery. You will die on that infamous table of yours, the same as my old friend General Mio.”
Shichio seethed with rage. “No. I can beguile him, the same as you—”
“Not the same. Do not mistake me for his lover just because I am his wife. My concern is for my husband, and then for the good of the empire. I could not care less where he puts his cock.”
“He cares. That’s all I need.”
Nene laughed out loud. She was so small, and her voice so high, that she sounded like twittering birds. “How long have you two known each other? Five years would be my guess. Hideyoshi and I have been married for twenty-seven. Do you have any idea how many playthings I’ve seen come and go in that time?”
She chirped again, as merrily as a flock of sparrows. “I’m told you are a special talent in the bedchamber,” she said. “That’s good. A whore ought to be talented; she has nothing else to recommend her. So by all means, find yourself a northern lord that wants to bugger you. Take as many lovers as you like. Just never let me hear from you again.”
10
Nene could not help but laugh. Shichio looked so comical that he might just as well have been an actor on the stage. The man was cunning, to be sure, but when he lost control of his temper he raged like a little child.
“We will go back to the banquet now,” she said, “and you will give me no more of these petulant looks. In exchange, I will not provoke you. In fact, I will say nothing to you unless I must. You will accept compliments and laugh at jokes and do everything else required of a noble lord. You will not be the first to leave, and you certainly will not spend your evening brooding in some dark hold of that monstrosity floating in the bay.”
She’d heard far too much about his behavior after Lady Okuma’s marriage to her infant groom. That was a shameful affair. Shichio might have been half child and half serpent, but he was one of Hideyoshi’s generals, and the office warranted a high degree of respect. In shaming him, these Okumas had shamed her husband. The fact that her husband found it hilarious made no difference. Nor did the fact that Shichio had run off like a sulking toddler to hide under the covers and cry himself to sleep.
All the same, Nene was intrigued by this boy they called the Bear Cub. Okuma Daigoro, his name was—or at least it had been until he’d renounced it. Son of Okuma Tetsuro, the Red Bear of Izu, who had sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu at the Battle of Mikatagahara and saved Ieyasu’s hide at the Battle of Komaki. Both father and son were tied up in stories of the Inazuma blades, which drew whispers of fascination at court. Nene knew little more of these Okumas. Their house was a speck of foam on the smallest wave in the smallest corner of the sea. Yet somehow this boy commanded Hideyoshi’s begrudging respect.
There was nothing begrudging from the men of the rank and file; they spoke of the Bear Cub as if he were Hachiman reborn. The god of war wandering the earth in human skin; that was what they were saying. Stranger still, many of the rumors were plainly true. All agreed he was a cripple, yet all agreed he’d bested General Mio—Mio, whom Takeda Shingen himself had once praised as the mightiest swordsman he’d ever known. True, that was years ago, but even if Mio was no longer the strongest, he was undoubtedly the biggest. By all accounts this Bear Cub was almost a waif. To hear the men tell it, the first blow knocked the boy so far across the dueling ground that Mio might just as well have delivered his next attack with a bow instead of his sword.
Little wonder, then, that the boy drove Shichio to madness. To be routed by a man with a host of banner poles instead of an army, and then to be outwitted by the same man’s sickly teenage son! It was too much for anyone to bear.
But Shichio wasn’t just anyone. He was her husband’s confidant. And he was drawn to power like sharks to blood. He would insinuate himself back into Hideyoshi’s inner circle given half a chance, and he certainly wouldn’t balk at poisoning Nene to do it. Now that she’d exiled him from power, he might kill her just for spite. The man never forgot a grudge.
“Hm.” She said it out loud without intending to. That was a small sign of how much he vexed her; Nene did not make a habit of losing her composure. But the thought of his many grudges inspired an idea in her.
“What?” Shichio snapped.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’d quite forgotten you were there.” She gave a little nod with her chin toward the tent. “Go on, then. Your guests will miss you.”
He snorted, turned on his heel, and returned to the feast. She hoped he had enough self-control to keep the anger from his face. It wouldn’t do for the assembled generals to start asking questions. That might require Nene to step back in and redirect the conversation, and she wanted a few moments alone with her thoughts.
Perhaps the Bear Cub could be of use. Shichio would never live down the shame of that wedding debacle, and even before the wedding, his grudge for the boy already burned as bright as the sun. Now that Shichio was samurai, it might even occur to him that he had honor to defend. For his part, the Bear Cub must have wisdom enough to know he could not rest until Shichio was dead. If Nene wanted to take the boy out of the game, she had only to rig a trap and offer Shichio as bait. The reverse was also true: to remove Shichio from play, she had only to set a trap with the Bear Cub as the lure.
Oh, yes, she thought, and what fun it would be to lay a double trap! Shichio was clever enough to sense a set-up, and he would never willingly expose himself as bait. But what if he believed he was not bait at all, but rather the trapper? If Nene could place the boy in a vulnerable position, Shichio would pounce on him, and if the boy was forewarned, he could counterstrike before Shichio landed the killing blow.
Now that was a clever notion. A bear trap, but in this case the bear was the trap. There was a witty haiku in there somewhere. Nene decided she’d write it after all was said and done.
In the meantime, she’d left herself a dangerous game to play, with a hunted bear and a spiteful cobra as her playmates. In the best of all worlds, the trap would result in a mutual slaying. But the worst case was very bad indeed. If she were caught in league with the boy, Hideyoshi’s wrath would be swift and terrible. Shichio could not be allowed to escape her trap alive. But if she put the Bear Cub in the right position, how could she be certain he would strike true? Could she even trust him to strike at all? There was n
o telling. She didn’t know his character. And there was only one way to rectify that; she would have to speak with him face-to-face.
She was like her husband that way: a keen judge of character, and loath to rely on hearsay when she could gather her information firsthand. But before she could arrange a meeting, she needed a plausible pretext for them to cross paths at all. It would not be enough for her to simply tell him she wanted Shichio dead. He would have no reason to believe her—and in fact no reason to believe she was not in league with Shichio. She had to need something from him, and then offer Shichio as payment.
But what? She would need some time to think about that. It was time to gather her spies, dozens of whom she’d sent to Izu before ever departing the capital. Nene was not one to act in ignorance; she had long maintained the habit of gathering as much intelligence as possible before making a decision. This evening’s decision required special care. She needed the Bear Cub to believe the two of them were on the same side, and she needed him to believe that he was doing her a service, the payment for which would be Shichio’s head. Only then could she lay the double trap she had in mind.
She mused on the problem over dinner, eating only lightly; her primary duty at table was to nod, smile, and issue the occasional word of praise as the assembled generals told their war stories. What could a rogue ronin offer the Lady in the North? The obvious answer was Glorious Victory, but she knew he would never part with it. Nene had never fully understood men’s fascination with their swords, though she supposed a genuine Inazuma was something special. But if not his sword, what could he offer?
A sudden shout from her husband broke her train of thought. “To General Shichio,” Hideyoshi cried, rising drunkenly to his feet. He thrust a sake flask at the sky. “The best damned quartermaster anyone could ask for.”
That raised a round of cheers. “And he’ll damn well need to be,” Hideyoshi said. Suddenly he was deadly serious. “These islands are not enough for me, gentlemen. Within the year the whole empire will be mine—and what then? Eh? What then?”