Sano Ichiro 11 Red Chrysanthemum (2006)

by Laura Joh Rowland

  But if that had been hard enough to do at the mountain temple, it was impossible now. Hirata could barely catch his breath, let alone control it. The gag in his mouth was soaked with the saliva that almost drowned him. His bad leg ached viciously. Panic took over his mind, thwarted meditation. A curse on Ozuno, who’d misled him to believe that the mystic martial arts were any use! He would like to see Ozuno get himself out of this predicament!

  But of course Ozuno would never have gotten into it in the first place. He’d have defeated Hoshina and his army at the start. Misery filled Hirata as he faced the fact that now he would never master the secret art of dim-mak. Shame added to his woes because he’d let Sano down, failed as a samurai. All his work, the trouble, the humiliation had been for nothing.

  “It all began the day after you came to call on me the first time,” Lady Mori told Reiko. “That morning Ukon said to me, ”I must warn you about Lady Reiko. She’s no good.“ ”

  “I said, ”You shouldn’t criticize someone who is your superior, especially when she’s my friend.“ But Ukon said, ”Please listen to what I have to say. Then decide for yourself whether you want to be friends with Lady Reiko.“ Well, I thought that was very presumptuous of her.” She cast a resentful glance at Ukon.

  Ukon sat with her arms folded, her expression furious. “If you want to confess and die, suit yourself. But leave me out of it!”

  “She had previously told me that her son, Goro, had been accused of killing a girl he’d gotten with child,” Lady Mori continued. “She said he didn’t do it. Now she said that you’d had him arrested, Lady Reiko. Your father the magistrate convicted him. He was executed. She said it was your fault.”

  Reiko pictured Ukon spewing her obsession and hatred into Lady Mori’s ear on many occasions that included the morning Tsuzuki had overheard them. How fate linked people together and set events in unpredictable motion!

  “I said maybe Goro was guilty, maybe she was just looking for somebody to blame for his death,” Lady Mori said. “But she believed in him even though he’d confessed. She said you should be punished for what you did to him.”

  If Reiko hadn’t known Tsuzuki, she wouldn’t be here now. If Ukon and Lady Mori hadn’t met up, Lord Mori would still be alive, Reiko wouldn’t be in trouble, and perhaps neither would Sano.

  “At first I didn’t believe her,” Lady Mori went on. “You seemed like a perfectly nice, harmless young woman. And you didn’t seem to remember Ukon. I told her that if you had really done what she’d said, you would have remembered her.”

  “Should have.” Malicious humor curled Ukon’s mouth. “Forgetting me was your mistake.”

  None of this would have happened if Reiko hadn’t had a taste for detective work, hadn’t started her private inquiry service. When had everything really begun? Perhaps when she’d married Sano. She wondered what he was doing now and felt such a strong prescience of danger that it dropped an invisible barrier between her and the other people in the room. Lady Mori went on talking, Ukon cursed at her, but Reiko couldn’t hear them; for a moment she could only see their lips move; she was imprisoned by her fear for Sano. She could barely stifle the urge to bolt from the room and run in frantic search of him.

  “But Ukon didn’t give up trying to convince me that you were evil,” Lady Mori said. “She said, ”If someone hurt you and your family, how would you feel? Wouldn’t you want revenge? Wouldn’t you want them to suffer the way they made you suffer? How could you bear to live as long as your enemy was alive?“ ”

  Her voice quavered and shrank. “Day after day she talked. I began to believe that her son was innocent, that he’d been wronged by you. And I began to understand how she felt.” A shadow of emotion dimmed her face. “Because I had felt that same way for so many years.”

  Sudden comprehension startled Reiko. “Then it’s true. Lord Mori did entertain himself with boys. He did kill some of them. And you knew.”

  “Yes. I knew.”

  Reiko felt vindicated because Lady Mori had finally admitted she’d lied. “You hated being the wife of a monster. Is that why he had to die?” The murder had clearly not been intended for Ukon’s benefit alone, and the victim hadn’t been her choice alone, either. “You wanted to make him pay for disgracing you?”

  “No.” Lady Mori gave Reiko a disdainful look. “You think you’re so clever. You think you have it all figured out, but you don’t. My own relations with my husband were of no importance. Ukon knew that very well. She knew everything else that he had done. Everyone in this house did.”

  Reiko frowned, puzzled because she’d thought she’d begun to untangle the reason for the murder, yet now, for a second time, it seemed she had a ways to go. “What else did he do? What did Ukon know?”

  “She said, ”You have a son. You love him the way I loved mine. How did you feel when he was hurt? Don’t you hate Lord Mori for what he did to Enju?“”

  “Do you mean he used Enju the way he used those other boys?” Reiko was shocked. “His own son?”

  Lady Mori’s disdain deepened. “Why are you so surprised? Lord Mori liked boys. When I remarried, Enju was a boy of just the right age for his taste.”

  Reiko realized she should have known. Lord Mori, a powerful man accustomed to taking what he wanted, wouldn’t have confined himself to the peasant boys he rented, or hesitated to take advantage of his new stepson. It wasn’t exactly incest; Enju and Lord Mori weren’t related by blood. But Reiko doubted that even a blood tie would have protected Enju.

  “Lord Mori wasn’t interested in me at all,” Lady Mori said. “At our first meeting, before we became engaged, he spent the whole time talking to Enju, playing with him. I thought that meant he would be a good stepfather.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I was too naive to understand what it really meant.”

  Why, Reiko wondered, hadn’t she thought of Enju being one of Lord Mori’s boys? A mother herself, she didn’t want to believe that such things were done to children by men who were supposed to be their fathers. Maternity had blinded her.

  “Then your story about your love for Lord Mori, and your perfect marriage, was a complete lie,” Reiko said.

  Tears glittered in Lady Mori’s eyes. “It was the way I wished things were.”

  “When did you realize they weren’t?”

  “A few months after I married Lord Mori. Enju’s whole nature changed during that time. He had been such a happy, friendly little boy. He turned sullen, withdrawn. He would wake up screaming from nightmares. When I asked him what was wrong, he wouldn’t tell me. I had him treated by a doctor, but it didn’t help.”

  Reiko remembered Sano telling her what Hirata had learned from the Mori clan physician. They should have suspected that Enju’s symptoms had resulted from sex forced on him.

  “He began walking in his sleep, or so I thought at first. I would go to his room at night to check on him, and he would be gone. I searched for him all over the estate, but I couldn’t find him.”

  Because he’d been in Lord Mori’s private chambers, Reiko deduced, a place his mother hadn’t thought to look.

  “One night I lay down on his bed to wait for him to come back. I fell asleep. I woke up when I heard him crying. He was curled up beside me. There was blood on his kimono.” Lady Mori’s face showed the fear she must have felt. “I undressed him. The blood was coming from his bottom. I knew then what had happened. Someone had taken him from his bed, and—”

  She gulped down the words that were too terrible to speak. “I said, ”Enju, who did this to you?“ He cried and said, ”I can’t tell you. He said he would kill me if I told.“ The next night I hid near Enju’s room. I saw my husband take Enju to his chambers. I followed them.” Her throat muscles contracted, strangling her voice. “And I heard.”

  A shiver passed through Lady Mori, a memory like a bad wind that stirred her whole body. Her eyes closed; their lids quivered. “I heard Enju crying while Lord Mori groaned and wrestled him like a wild beast.”

  Even as
Reiko imagined the horror of it, she observed that part of Lady Mori’s story was true. She had spied on sexual sport in the private chambers, although not between Lord Mori and Reiko and not on the night he’d died. Reiko felt sick herself. “How could you let him do that to your son?”

  “I was afraid of him. Afraid he would kill us both if I interfered.” Lady Mori hastened to say, “But I did try to stop him. The next day, I asked him to leave Enju alone. But he said he was in charge and he could do whatever he pleased.” She sobbed at her own helplessness. “I went to my brother, who’s a daimyo. I told him I wanted to leave Lord Mori. I begged him to take Enju and me in. But he was afraid of Lord Mori, too. He didn’t want to start a war. He said that if I left Lord Mori, I would be on my own, with nothing, and Lord Mori would keep my son.”

  Reiko noted that another part of Lady Mori’s story was also true. She had sought family support, although not to end an affair between Lord Mori and Reiko, and been refused.

  “There was nothing for Enju or me to do except suffer in silence.” The weight of misery and guilt visibly crushed Lady Mori. “We grew apart. He knew that I knew what Lord Mori was doing. He blamed me because I didn’t protect him. He was just a child, he didn’t understand how helpless I was. What could I have done?” She appealed to Reiko, eager to justify her inaction. “Steal him away, and try to bring him up by myself?”

  That would have been Reiko’s first thought under the circumstances. But although she was tempted to despise Lady Mori for her weakness, she knew the world was a harsh place for a woman alone and poor. She saw the rationale for staying and enduring. “So you waited for Enju to get older and Lord Mori to lose interest in him.”

  “Yes!” The word burst from Lady Mori in a cry of pain. “If only I had known what would come next. Lord Mori did lose interest in Enju when he grew up, but he wasn’t finished with him.” Anger and revulsion contorted her face. “He made Enju find boys for him and arrange for them to be brought to the estate.”

  Reiko shook her head, amazed because she’d thought that the tale of the Mori family couldn’t possibly get worse. That Lord Mori had turned his stepson and former sexual object into a procurer!

  “But that’s not all,” Lady Mori continued. “When Lord Mori killed the boys…” She put her face in her hands and wept so hard that Reiko could barely understand her as she said, “He made Enju dispose of their bodies.”

  That Lord Mori had turned his heir into an accomplice to murder! Yet even while fresh shock hit Reiko, she saw a chance to solve part of the mystery. “What did Enju do with them?”

  “He took them to a crematorium in the Z6jo Temple district. He paid the undertakers to burn the bodies and not tell anyone.”

  This was what must have happened to the boy that Reiko had seen, and the reason Sano had been unable to find the body. Enju, or someone else, had followed the procedure, and the boy was ashes by now. Reiko had another question she desperately wanted answered. “Was there a boy named Jiro? This spring, in cherry blossom time?”

  Lady Mori shook her head woefully. “I don’t know. There were so many boys.”

  “Try to remember,” Reiko urged, anxious to learn whether Jiro and Lily existed, and if so, to find out what had happened to the child.

  “I didn’t want to see. I looked the other way.”

  Torn between pitying her and deploring her for burying her head in the sand, Reiko said, “You were lucky. You still have Enju. Think about the mothers who never saw their sons again after Lord Mori had them.”

  Lady Mori covered her ears. “I don’t want to think about them. There was nothing I could do. Besides, he didn’t kill them all. I don’t know what became of the ones he didn’t.”

  This raised but didn’t satisfy Reiko’s hopes that Jiro was real and alive. Still, at least Reiko now knew much of Lady Mori’s true story. For years Lady Mori had seethed with anger at her husband; then arrived Ukon, with her own bone to pick. After Reiko had come on the scene, they’d discovered their common interests. Both thought their sons had been misused by evil, powerful people; both had hungered for revenge.

  “So you came up with a plan to kill two birds with one arrow.” Yet Reiko still needed to fill in the gaps in her memory. “But what exactly happened that night?”

  “You don’t remember anything?” Ukon said.

  “Nothing after I fainted outside Lord Mori’s chambers,” Reiko said.

  Lady Mori moaned. “Please don’t make me talk about it. I can’t bear to even think of it.”

  “Then I’ll tell her.” Ukon radiated malice at Reiko. “It’s not fair that you should forget.” Eager to have Reiko know the worst, she cast aside caution. “I want you to hear.”

  Sano lay exhausted in the palanquin with Hirata, his lungs heaving from his struggles, his muscles cramped. He’d managed to loosen the ropes around his wrists, but not enough to free his hands. He thought of Reiko, her trial. He couldn’t help her anymore. She was on her own, her death certain.

  He thought of Masahiro, and such anguish filled him that he almost beat his head against the hard plank floor. His death would leave his son helpless, his future in peril.

  His anger at Hoshina kept his fear and despair at bay. He tried to concentrate on where he was going. Although he’d lost his sense of direction, he knew he was heading out of town because the city noises had diminished. Hoshina was taking him and Hirata somewhere isolated to dispose of them. Sano rested awhile, then strained at the ropes around his wrists and managed to stretch them a bit wider. He tried to think of a plan to save his life and Hirata’s.

  Nothing occurred to him.

  A stench filtered into Sano’s nostrils, putrid and familiar. Now he knew where he was—near the eta settlement, where the outcasts lived. He’d been here once, on an investigation. The stench came from the tanneries run by the outcasts, situated away from town so the smell wouldn’t offend the citizens and the taint of death wouldn’t pollute their spirits.

  The bearers slowed their pace and muttered in disgust. Captain Torai called, “Get a move on.” Their feet sloshed in the gutters that ran through the settlement. The reek of sewage added to the tannery stench and nauseated Sano. The commotion of the settlement engulfed him. The rattle of buckets, axes chopping, laughter and curses, the wails of the sick and dying, formed an auditory picture of humanity crowded too close together in squalor. Men shouted, brawling. “Get out of the way,” Captain Torai ordered. A crowd scattered. “Turn left. Slow down,” Torai said. Sano felt the palanquin’s motion correspond to Torai’s orders. Again he strained at the ropes. They were slippery with blood from chafing his wrists. “Go in there. All right. Put it down.”

  The palanquin tilted and rocked as the bearers eased the poles off their shoulders. It thumped onto the ground, jolting Sano and Hirata. Hooves clopped and armor creaked as Hoshina and his retinue gathered around them. The quality of the sound suggested a wide yet enclosed space. The tannery stench was so overpowering that Sano felt swamped by it. He heard the men jump off their horses, then smooth, metallic rasps of swords drawn.

  Panic rippled through Sano, through Hirata’s body next to him. The bearers cried, “No, masters! Please!” in voices shrill with terror. There was a scuffle, hissing noises and thuds, exclamations of horror quickly stifled.

  Even as Sano realized what had happened, Hoshina said, “Take them out.” The palanquin door opened. Torai and another man reached in, grabbed Sano and Hirata, and dragged them onto the ground.

  Sano found himself in a courtyard surrounded by low buildings with peeling plaster walls. The source of the stench was a pit in the center. Dead horses protruded from the murky water, which bubbled with gases and sent forth corrosive lye fumes. Two of Hoshina’s men held swords that dripped blood. Before them lay the corpses of the palanquin bearers, who’d been killed so they couldn’t spread word that Hoshina had kidnapped two high officials. More troops guarded four frightened men with shaggy hair and bare feet, dressed in ragged, dirty clothes
. They were the eta whose rendering factory Hoshina had commandeered for disposing of Sano and Hirata.

  A pair of legs clad in ornate metal shin guards strode up to Sano’s face. Twisting his neck, Sano saw Hoshina grinning down at him.

  “Well, Chamberlain Sano,” Hoshina said, “our positions are finally reversed. I must say it feels good.” His voice was jittery with excitement, anticipation, and fear of his own daring. He kicked Sano hard in the ribs. Sano stifled a grunt of pain. Hoshina laughed and ordered his troops, “Sit them up by the pit.”

  Soldiers dragged Sano and Hirata across ground slick with mud, blood, and entrails and littered with broken bones, to the water’s edge, and propped them on their knees. Stiff and sore from the ride, Sano hoped the men wouldn’t notice that his ropes were loose enough that he might squeeze one hand through. Hoshina jerked the gags out of Sano’s mouth, then Hirata’s. Now Sano could taste the noxious fumes that wafted over them.

  “Any last words before you disappear forever?” Hoshina said.

  Sano looked into the pit. Greenish bubbles burped around the decomposing horse carcasses. He swallowed.

  “Don’t you think I’ve chosen a good place for you to vanish?” Hoshina sounded eager to be reassured. “It’ll be as if you both dropped off the face of the earth.”

  Because the eta would be too afraid of Hoshina to talk even if anyone would listen to them. Sano reminded himself that he had only one death, and it was the biggest test of his samurai character. He must face it with dignity and courage, not waste it on fear. He saw Hirata’s rigid expression and knew his friend was thinking the same thoughts, fighting the same battle for self-control. At least they would die together.