by Steve Bein
He tried to flinch away, but iron-hard hands held him tight. The feeling of being trapped automatically made him struggle. The frowning woman tsked him and jabbed him with something sharp. The knife slid farther out of him. Blood spilled down his back in a hot cascade. He twitched and wriggled but the hands held fast. “Daigoro, lie still,” said a deep voice. “You’ll tear your stitches loose.”
The voice was familiar. “Go-Goemon?”
“I’m here. Now show a little patience and stop your squirming.”
*
It was another day before Daigoro could keep himself awake for as long as an hour, a day after that before he began to feel like a human being again. He had a splitting headache, the kind he got when he went too long without water. He’d spilled too much of his lifeblood on the floor of that shrine. The only remedy was to drink enough to drown a whale. That gave him an hourly need to make water, but getting out of bed made the walls spin. And when his head and his bladder were not pestering him, Katsushima continuously forced food on him. The healers insisted the best medicine for drastic blood loss was chicken livers and ginseng root—bowlful by heaping bowlful, enough to suffocate him.
At least he would choke to death in comfort. He lay on a soft futon on clean bedclothes. Daigoro gathered that Katsushima had ordered the lord of the house to lodge his guests in the cleanest room in the compound. The lord’s steward was none too pleased, for it was his quarters that became the hospital. Daigoro never got the man’s proper name—he went only by Karei, which meant “steward”—but he gleaned quite a bit about his displaced host just from how he kept his rooms. Karei was tidy to a fault. His bedroll, scroll cupboards, and writing tools were all here, suggesting that he spent the great majority of his life in these spare, orderly rooms. Daigoro had no doubt that Karei’s quarters did not usually stink of blood and chicken livers.
“I have a confession to make,” Daigoro told Katsushima, pitying Karei every bit as much as himself. The livers had coated the roof of his mouth like thick, wet fur. “I’m giving serious thought to killing the cook.”
“Don’t. Lord Oda’s serving staff all abandoned him when he stopped paying them. The healing woman who stitched up your wounds is serving double duty in the kitchen.”
“It shows. Her cooking tastes like medicine …” He trailed off, because his sluggish, staggering mind had finally latched on to the most important thing Katsushima had said. “Did you say Oda? You can’t mean Oda Tomonosuke.”
Katsushima only answered with a mute nod.
Daigoro’s thoughts stumbled over each other like rocks falling downhill. They all tried to hurry out of his mouth at once, and the result was a mishmash of quasi-words. At last he managed to say, “Why? Why would he save me? I slew his son.”
“He felt he was duty-bound to help.”
Daigoro did not miss the smugness in Katsushima’s tone. “Oh no. What did you do?”
“I told him if it were not for his idiotic son killing your idiotic brother, both of your houses would have escaped their evil karma. Of course I put it a little more politely than that. Have a care when you speak to him, Daigoro. His family has suffered as much as yours.”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
“Believe what you like. Just be delicate in handling him.”
Daigoro choked down another pasty mouthful of liver. “If I live long enough to speak with him. This vile mash may kill me yet.”
“Keep eating.” Katsushima spoke like a father to a child—or rather, like a mostly sober friend to a reckless drunk. For the first time Daigoro noticed Katsushima was almost as poorly off as he was. He seemed older than his years, hollowed out somehow, like a sloughed-off snakeskin. Black silk stitches traced thin, weeping lines on each cheek, and Daigoro suspected he’d find many more stitches under the cotton fabric binding both of Katsushima’s forearms. Clearly the old rogue was holding himself together for Daigoro’s benefit. Equally clear was that he’d prefer to push Daigoro out of bed and go to sleep himself.
“You’re a good friend, Goemon.”
“You’re talking like a drunkard. Here, flush it out.” He pressed a stout Bizen water cup into Daigoro’s hands.
Daigoro did as he was told. He knew Katsushima would not tolerate rebellion. The rough clay of the cup pricked him when he touched it to his lips. Exploring with a cautious, delicate fingertip, Daigoro found the lower half of his face was burned and blistered. The tea. He remembered now: that priest-assassin had tried to pour scalding-hot poison down his throat.
That thought spawned visions of the assassin’s awful wounds. Every one of them should have been fatal, yet somehow that mysterious tanto staved off death. Thinking of it made Daigoro recall his first waking memory after the fight: that very dagger, sliding sickeningly out of his body. That sparked off a new realization about his friend Katsushima. “You believe in enchanted swords now.”
“Hm?”
“You stabbed me. With Streaming Dawn. That’s the first thing I felt when I came to: that knife, stuck in my back. Let me tell you, it hurts a lot more coming out than going in.”
“The sharp ones always do.”
“Yes, well, my point …” It took him a moment to remember what he meant to say. His thoughts were swimming through muddy water; it was easy to lose sight of them. “My point is that you stabbed me with it. You wouldn’t have done that unless you thought it would save me. You had to believe in the power of Streaming Dawn.”
“Ehh.” Katsushima grunted and shrugged. “What other options did I have? If I did nothing, you were sure to bleed to death. I tried the knife because there was nothing else left to try.”
“No. You believe now. I can tell.”
“You still sound like a drunkard.”
Katsushima gave a didactic look at Daigoro’s water cup. Daigoro obliged him and drank. “Thank you, Goemon.”
“Shut up.”
“I suppose I ought to thank Oda-sama too, sooner or later.”
“Let it be later. Gather your strength.”
“No, it may as well be now.” Daigoro shot a foul glare at his livers and ginseng. “I’ve already got a bitter taste in my mouth.”
35
He found Lord Oda Tomonosuke praying at the small shrine erected by one of his forebears in a remote corner of the compound. The shrine was as neglected as everything else Daigoro had seen here. Its proud torii, once a brilliant orange, had faded to the color of peach flesh. Its paint had chipped and cracked in a hundred places. The surrounding gravel seemed dirty somehow, as if the rain had deliberately neglected this place. Clearly no groundskeeper’s rake had been here in ages. Fresh sticks of incense burned in a bronze censer so pitted and rotten that it threatened to fall apart at any moment. If this was how Oda kept up the holiest of possessions, Daigoro could scarcely imagine what his kitchens must look like, or his bedchamber.
Oda himself was in little better shape than his shrine. His face was puffy, his eyes bloodshot. He’d put on weight since Daigoro saw him last. He’d given up care for his clothing and made only desultory efforts at grooming. A mole on his cheek had grown hairs as long as Daigoro’s little finger.
“My lord,” Daigoro said, “may I join you in prayer?”
Oda studied him with red-rimmed eyes. Only his eyes moved, not his head. At last he muttered, “Why not?”
This was not the genteel man Daigoro once knew. When Lord Oda’s son Yoshitomo had come to challenge the Okumas, Ichiro insulted him and Yoshitomo was only too glad to begin the bloodletting. Only Daigoro and Lord Oda showed self-restraint. They sat down to tea, shared polite conversation, then established the terms of the duel. That Lord Oda would never have given such cruel looks out of the corner of his eye. This one was little more than a shadow.
Even so, Daigoro was certain the two of them could find common ground. They had lost so much. According to Katsushima, there was a time when House Oda was renowned for its swordsmanship. It once enjoyed wealth and prestige, but clearly that
was lost to them. Daigoro couldn’t understand how they’d fallen this far—it was less than a year ago that Ichiro and Yoshitomo were killed—but if he could tease that story out of Lord Oda, he might find something they shared in common, some foundation on which he could start building sympathy.
To put himself on a level with Oda, he kneeled beside the older man. His bad knee buckled, so Daigoro fell as much as kneeled. The rapid movement made him light-headed. To keep his head from spinning, he fixed his eyes on the grave markers arrayed before the shrine. The newest was a tall wooden stele, painted with the name Mutsu no Mikoto. Daigoro remembered the name; Lady Mutsu was Oda’s wife. “My lord,” he said, “I am sorry for your loss. I remember you speaking of your wife when we first sat down to tea. May I ask when she passed on?”
“She died the day she learned you killed her son.”
Daigoro was stunned. Well-bred people did not speak so bluntly. “I … I don’t understand.”
“I suppose I ought to thank you,” Oda said scornfully. “You must have been the one to send a rider, informing us of Yoshitomo’s death.”
“I was.”
“When my wife read your letter, it shattered her spirit. Yoshitomo was more than our dojo’s champion; he was her favorite son. She never admitted as much, but I always knew it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Are you? Then be sorry for this too. My house is ruined. My dojo has been losing money for years. When word reached us of this braggart in the north, Okuma Ichiro, we knew silencing him might earn us the fame we needed to stay afloat. And indeed it did. But then rumors reached us that the braggart would not die. Why could he not shut his mouth?”
I might ask the same of your son, Daigoro thought. But he could not say that. Neither could he think of any words of comfort.
“I married above my station,” Oda said. “My wife’s family was far wealthier than mine. When the Oda dojo began to crumble, she became despondent. Poverty did not become her. Once Yoshitomo died, our financial fate was sealed. It was more than she could bear. That letter of yours, that’s what broke her.”
Buddhas have mercy, Daigoro thought. He knew what came next, and it made his heart sink.
“She took her own life,” said Oda. “To her credit, she did it properly, the way a samurai’s daughter ought to. Right here. Right in front of this shrine.”
Daigoro looked in horror at the gravel he knelt upon. Had Oda bothered to cart it off and replace it after his wife’s suicide? Or had that been the moment he decided to abandon decorum? Had the last of his servants washed this holy site of her blood, or had he left the rain to perform that task? Was Daigoro kneeling in her lifeblood even now?
“I hope I can die with as much dignity,” Oda said. He spoke with scorn and sorrow in equal measure. “It is the only hope remaining to me: to die as a samurai. As did my wife. As did my son. I suppose I ought to thank you for that too.”
“You need thank me for nothing,” said Daigoro. “Tell me, is there anything I can do for you?”
Oda’s eyes widened in surprise. Perhaps he had not looked for such generosity from the Bear Cub of Izu. He studied Daigoro for a long moment, pensive and silent. At last he said, “Yes. There is one thing you can do. Kill me.”
“My lord, please—”
“You asked, so I’ve answered. Let a line of warriors end as warriors. What hope do I have of dying with a sword in my hand? My warring days are long past me. I cannot even teach kenjutsu anymore. No one will come. When I die, my family’s dojo dies with me, and I must go to my forefathers to tell them I failed them. Give me this one thing at least: let me tell them I died on an Inazuma blade.”
Daigoro was horrified at the thought. Even so, he knew it was not his place to question a samurai’s wishes. Like it or not, Daigoro wasn’t samurai anymore. Though it pained him even to think it, he said, “If my lord were to challenge me to a duel, I suppose I could—”
“No!” Oda sprang to his feet, overflowing with rage. “My last act in this life will not be to suffer defeat. I did not say duel with me. I said kill me. In cold blood. Draw your sword if you have the courage, or else be gone.”
Daigoro struggled to his feet. “Lord Oda, we must find a middle path. There is still something I must ask of you.”
Oda coughed and staggered back, just as if Daigoro had kicked him in the chest. “You dare to ask a favor? Of me? After all you’ve done?”
“Begging your pardon, my lord, but in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of men, I have done your family no wrong. I did only what bushido requires of me. I think you know this, Lord Oda. I think you understand bushido better than most, or else you would not rue the prospect of dying as less than a samurai.”
Oda’s face grew red. The tendons and veins in his neck stood out. The way he pursed his mouth, he looked angry enough to spit. “Ask, then.”
“Are you any relation to Oda Nobunaga?”
“Of course. The Odas and Odas are cousins. Our branch is the more storied lineage, I’ll have you know—or at least it was, until that sadist Nobunaga chopped his way into power.”
“There is a woman I must reach out to. She was a friend to … to the sadist Nobunaga. She said I could make contact with her through her allies with House Oda.”
“Ah. And you believe I am one of these allies?”
“I don’t know. But I think you must know someone who is. He was powerful here. So were you.”
Oda wiped his hand over his mouth. Daigoro could hear his whiskers scraping against the pads of his fingers. “This woman you want to reach, is her name Nene by any chance?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are a fool. What business could the Lady in the North possibly have with a half-dead, homeless, crippled, bloodthirsty ronin?”
Daigoro did not rise to the bait. Clearly Lord Oda still wanted to die. There was no other reason to insult an armed man so brashly. “Our business is our own,” he said flatly.
“Our business? Talk to her often, do you?”
“These days more often than usual.” That much was not a lie. Clearly it impressed Oda; it wiped the smirk off his face.
“I see,” Oda said gravely. “So this is the favor you would ask of me? To send word to Lady Nene?”
“Yes. Most importantly, I want your sworn word that no one else will intercept the message.”
Now the smirk came back. “Don’t be an ass. These are troubled times. War is afoot. Who can guarantee that a messenger should find his way through unmolested?”
“You can and you will. Carry the message yourself if you must.”
Drawing himself up to his full height, Oda sneered. Daigoro could see where Yoshitomo’s swagger had come from. “So now I’ve become your pageboy, eh? But you’ve told me too much, Daigoro. Someone wants to read your letters. Perhaps this someone wants to know where you are. Are you a hunted man, Daigoro?”
“You are enjoying yourself entirely too much, sir. I can only hope you will do your duty just as gladly.”
Another sneer. “And what duty would that be?”
“I will hand you a letter. You will deliver it or die in the attempt. Bushido asks no less of you.”
“Bah! Are you my liege lord? No. You came here in a wheelbarrow. That brigand Katsushima could have delivered a load of manure the same way. Why should I give a moment’s thought to you and your oh-so-important message?”
In an act of surpassing generosity, Daigoro did not cut him in half. Instead, in a low, measured voice, he said, “If I were to set fire to your house, it would be my duty to put it out, neh?”
“Do you threaten me, boy?”
Daigoro ignored the question. “Suppose the house burned down. Would you agree that it is my duty to build you a new one?”
“Yes. What of it?”
“Suppose it were not me, but rather my son who burned your house down. Whose duty is it to rebuild it for you?”
Oda grumbled and steamed. “Whatever your point is, please make it soon.�
��
“You cannot begin to imagine all of the things your son cost my family when he killed Ichiro. If he had simply burned our house to the ground, he would have done less damage. And if that were all he had done, my lord, you would not have to be samurai to recognize your duty to set matters right. Even merchants and yakuzas teach their sons as much: if the child will not atone for his wrongs, then his parents must do it for him. Without that bond of shame, our society would fall apart.”
“So what if it would?”
“Your son owes my family a devastating debt. In repayment I ask you the simplest favor. I could demand that you beggar your own clan to build a new house for mine. Instead I only ask you to carry a letter to someone, and to let no one read it but her. If you will not do that, are you even worthy of the name ‘samurai’? Or are you just a coward with a topknot?”
Daigoro’s words stung Oda like wasps. Daigoro could see him flinch. Lord Oda did not care to hear about his son’s offenses, nor of the debt he’d incurred. He certainly didn’t care to suffer an assault to his honor as a samurai. But the reason he felt the words sting was that they were envenomed with truth.
“Your letter,” Oda said, his eyes vacant. He seemed to be speaking to a ghost. “Your letter …”
He returned to the shrine and uprooted a weather-beaten stele that stood next to his wife’s. Watching him tug at it reminded Daigoro of pulling a sword out of a dying man’s belly. The ground seemed to cling to the wooden stele, just as a body clutched jealously to the weapon that pierced it. At last he pulled it free and handed it to Daigoro.
Daigoro could barely make out the writing on its dried, grayed face. Yoshitomo no Mikoto, it read. It was his son’s grave marker. Below his name ran a haiku:
Stones cannot climb up;
A boar will never back down.
Some can only fall.
“Do you recognize the poem?” said Oda.
“Of course.” Daigoro hadn’t thought about those lines for a long time. Reading them now made him blink back tears. “I … I wrote it for your son and my brother. It was their death poem.”