Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  “Loud. Clumsy. Could have managed it before. Impossible now.”

  “Why?”

  “Had many targets before. Now only two.”

  “No,” Daigoro said. “There must be fifty targets down there—”

  He cut himself short, because suddenly the shinobi’s meaning became clear. His concern wasn’t with finding Toyotomis to kill; it was with Toyotomi arrows finding targets.

  Daigoro didn’t care for being thought of as a target. Still, he supposed the shinobi had a point. His initial complement of six could have created distractions in every direction. They were trained in such arts. Now there was only one to distract the enemy—enough for a lone sentry, but not nearly enough to draw every last arrow away from Daigoro.

  “I don’t suppose you have a second backup plan,” Daigoro whispered.

  “Ten plans. Twenty. No matter. What you lack is time.”

  It took Daigoro a moment to unravel what he meant by that—he was so tired—but at length he understood: Shichio was coming. Thus far he’d foreseen Daigoro’s every move. He’d placed an assassin in Daigoro’s bedchamber, he’d locked Izu under a blockade, and somehow he’d even stationed a garrison at the Green Cliff. The one gambit he hadn’t expected—commandeering the ketch—was only possible because he had foreseen the need to put the entire coastline under watch. If the storm hadn’t driven the ketch’s crew to port, Daigoro might never have made it as far as he did. Shichio had known Daigoro was heading north almost as soon as Daigoro set out. That would only accelerate his plans to marry Daigoro’s mother; in fact, he was probably already en route. If he came by road, Daigoro had a day or two at most. If he came as he did last time, by sea, he might arrive by morning.

  Daigoro needed to deliver his message to Lord Yasuda, and he needed to do it now.

  He looked at the shinobi, who still wore his pirated Toyotomi garb. The kiri crest drew his eye. “I know of one distraction compelling enough to draw off all those men,” he said. “Me. I’m the only bait they’re sure to go for.”

  The shinobi gave him a nod.

  “Then what choice do I have?” Daigoro said. “It’s time to give them what they want.”

  55

  The Toyotomi lieutenant could hardly believe his eyes. There he was, the Bear Cub of Izu. He went disguised, wearing Toyotomi colors, but there was no mistaking that enormous sword of his. It flashed in the moonlight, and even from a hundred paces off the lieutenant could hardly believe the size of it.

  The boy was in hot pursuit, chasing one of the lieutenant’s own men. Both of them limped as much as ran. Rumor held that the Bear Cub had a lame leg; his quarry probably hobbled because the Bear Cub had wounded him. “Archers!” the lieutenant said. “Nock!”

  Ten men leaped to their feet and put arrows to their bowstrings. “Mark,” the lieutenant said. “Draw.” His man was increasing his lead, but that made no matter; he should never have fled the enemy in the first place. If a stray arrow found him on its way to the Bear Cub, so be it. An ignominious death was exactly what he deserved.

  Unless. Was there some conceivable reason to retreat? Or if not to retreat, to quickly return—and perhaps to report? That was it. General Shichio had authorized the lieutenant to handpick his detachment, and the lieutenant chose only good soldiers. Brave men, seasoned men, men patient enough to endure the boredom of garrison duty. Such men knew not to flee combat, especially not when the enemy was so a prized target. General Shichio had already promised a thousand koku to the one who claimed the Bear Cub’s head. The lieutenant didn’t approve of such incentives himself—it was merchant’s thinking, offering a reward simply for fulfilling one’s duty—and he’d chosen soldiers of similar mind. Not one of them would flee the Bear Cub unless he had something invaluable to report, something so important that the Bear Cub would risk exposure to cut him down.

  The lieutenant ordered his men to relax their bowstrings. “You there,” he barked, pointing at the four door guards, “go protect that scout. Drive off the Bear Cub if you must, kill him if you can—”

  It was too late. The Cub’s sword shone like a comet. It flashed in a wide glittering arc and the scout’s legs died under him, limp as wet rags. He collapsed bloodlessly; with a sword large enough to chop a man in half, the Bear Cub cut just deep enough to nick the spinal cord.

  “Go, go!” the lieutenant yelled. The door guards were already in motion, spears leveled. “Archers, loose! Loose at will!”

  The Bear Cub stood his ground, waving his sword defiantly above his kill. Arrows sang as they took flight. The lieutenant redeployed eight spearmen to guard the Yasuda gate and rallied the rest of his unit into formation.

  The first salvo from the archers fell short. They adjusted their aim and shot again, loosing haphazardly now, no longer in unison. Still the Bear Cub stood his ground, and with a deft swipe from that massive sword, he struck ten arrows right out of the air.

  It was impossible. The boy must have been part cat; how else could he have seen an arrow in the dark? The thought of deflecting ten of them sent the lieutenant’s head spinning. At last he understood why General Shichio deployed fifty men to dispatch a single teenage boy.

  Still his men had not formed ranks. He knew they were well trained, knew it was only the heat of the moment that confounded his mind, but to him his unit seemed to be wading through water. “Pick up your feet, you damned sluggards! Move!”

  At last the Bear Cub turned to run. The lieutenant could wait no longer. He led the first platoon himself, commanding the rest to follow as soon as they managed to form up. His archers fell in behind him, dropping their bows in favor of swords.

  He was the first to reach the fallen scout, who still attempted to crawl, dragging his legs uselessly behind him. The man seemed so small. “Easy,” the lieutenant said. “Easy, soldier.” He crouched beside the scout and sent the rest of his platoon around the bend in the road. “Report. What are you doing out here alone?”

  “Not alone,” grunted the scout, his head hanging heavily between his shoulders. He clutched the lieutenant’s sword belt as if trying to pull himself upright. “My patrol. All killed. Ran us down outside the Okuma compound. Killed us all.”

  A prayer for mercy escaped the lieutenant’s lips unbidden. He did not want to believe in boys with magic swords and cat’s eyes, but what else could explain what he’d seen tonight? There, twenty paces ahead, he spied another corpse along the roadway, lying facedown in the weeds and clad in Toyotomi colors. How many more littered this road? Could the Bear Cub have felled an entire patrol?

  “You men, up here!” barked the lieutenant, his voice echoing off the Green Cliff. The remainder of his force came running, save the eight men reassigned to guard the door. “Our quarry is out there in these hills,” he said when they reached him. “Watch yourselves; this one is as dangerous as they come. Half of you, over the hill. The rest, take the road.”

  The limp-legged scout still clung to the lieutenant’s belt, trying to pull himself up though he lacked even the strength to raise his own head. He seemed to weigh nothing at all. The lieutenant hadn’t even seen the scout’s face yet, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He felt a pang of guilt for wanting to leave this man to die on his own, a warrior who had served his daimyo well. He felt even worse for not charging out to meet the enemy with the rest of his troops, who vanished over the hillcrest or around the bend in the road even as he watched them. He should have been at their head, facing the same danger, running the same risks as the two who now lay in the road, one dead and the other dying.

  “Easy, son,” the lieutenant said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Much easier than I thought,” the scout said, and he thrust a knife into the lieutenant’s chin.

  • • •

  Daigoro did not let go of the knife because he wasn’t sure the lieutenant was dead.

  He’d expected to feel a great swell of shame and self-loathing after such skullduggery, but the sad and simple truth was that Dai
goro was exhausted, and stabbing a defenseless man was much easier than facing him sword to sword. Later, he thought, he’d try to convince himself that deceit on the battlefield was no stain on one’s honor, and that his ruse with this lieutenant was no different than his father’s ruse with the “ghost army” that defeated Shichio and Hideyoshi. For now, it was enough that he was still alive, and that his enemy was either dead or dying, depending on how far the knife had gone up into his brain.

  He gave a quick, low whistle. Twenty paces up the road, a dead body in Toyotomi colors got to its feet and picked its way out of the weeds. It was the shinobi, who moments before had made this lieutenant believe he was the infamous Bear Cub, then batted a volley of arrows aside, then transformed himself into a Toyotomi corpse, all without effort. He’d even draped his lifeless form over Glorious Victory Unsought, concealing it from all the troops that dashed past him in pursuit of a Bear Cub they would not find.

  “I don’t know how you managed that trick with the arrows,” Daigoro told him, “but that was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  The shinobi ignored the compliment. “Your sword. Too big for you.”

  Daigoro nodded and shrugged. “That sword is too big for anyone.”

  “Stronger than you look. Impressive.”

  For a fleeting moment, Daigoro’s fear and fatigue lifted from him. An exchange of mutual respect, between himself and the deadliest man he’d ever encountered. Daigoro had to stop and think for a moment just to be sure it had happened. Then the moment passed, and Daigoro remembered the weight of what he needed to do.

  He and the shinobi made a show of caring for the lieutenant, for the benefit of the Toyotomis still manning the gate. At this distance they would need eagle’s eyes to notice their lieutenant was now the wounded one and their fallen scout had sprung miraculously to life. They would see only three men, one of them hanging between the other two like a field-dressed deer. With that disguise in place, Daigoro made the long walk to the Green Cliff.

  At the gate all eyes were on the grisly form of the lieutenant. The cloying stench of his blood tainted the smoke and ash from the cookfires. Together they stank of hell. Hinges wailed like tortured spirits as the Toyotomis put their shoulders into the gates. Then the lieutenant wailed too, giving Daigoro such a start that he nearly dropped the man. Somehow the lieutenant still clung to life, and also to his duty. He tried in vain to warn his garrison of the ruse, but with the knife pinning his jaws shut, he could only moan loud and long. It sounded like his ghost leaving his body, and between that, the wailing gates, and the smells of blood and fire, to Daigoro’s weary mind the gate to House Yasuda had become the gates of hell.

  He kept his head low and tried to take an accurate count of the enemy. Crunching on the gravel were eight pairs of booted feet. His own shadow stretched before him, bound to that of the lieutenant and the shinobi, as if the whole concatenous mass were the shadow of some hideous six-legged demon. Somehow the vision gave him strength: if this was hell, then at least he was the demon.

  “Bar the gate,” he said. “We can’t let that Bear Cub get inside.”

  He waited until he heard the bar drop before he drew steel. He killed the first of the eight with his wakizashi, then drew Glorious Victory from the lieutenant’s back. Together, Daigoro and the shinobi made short work of the rest.

  56

  Yasuda Jinbei had never been a large man, and illness had withered him even further. His cheeks were sharper than Daigoro remembered, as if the bones pushed through his skin with a mind of their own. His thin hands lay folded across his blanket, and there too the sallow skin sagged between the hollows of the bones. His white hair splayed limply across his pillow like a fan. The sight of it made Daigoro think of General Mio, and his mind reeled away from the memory of Mio’s terrible wounds, fixating instead on the image of the giant man gleaming in his black armor, his hair as white as the snow atop Mount Fuji. By comparison, Lord Yasuda’s hair seemed yellow, faded, brittle. His pale eyebrows were in the grips of a permanent, pain-ridden scowl.

  “Lord Yasuda,” Daigoro said, kneeling gingerly at the edge of the aging daimyo’s bed. “Can you hear me?”

  Yasuda opened his rheumy eyes. “Hehh,” he said, forcing a chuckle that sounded more like a cough. “I must be doing worse than I thought. You look at me as if I’m already a corpse, Okuma-dono.”

  “It’s just Daigoro now.”

  “So I’ve heard. A bold thing, that. Unorthodox too. Reminds me of your father.”

  “You honor me.”

  “Then it’s time you honored him. He was bold, not reckless. And his every breath was in service to his clan and his code. Is this the best way to serve your family?”

  Daigoro felt his face flush and changed the subject. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better than I look, if that face you make is any indication. Just wait and see, Okuma-dono. I’ll lick this yet.”

  Daigoro tried to smile. “I don’t doubt it, Yasuda-sama.”

  “Oh yes, you do. And don’t you sama me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re still Lord Protector of Izu, the same as your father.”

  “That honor belongs to my son,” said Daigoro.

  “Assuming you have a son.” He laughed and coughed. “Who’s to say that lovely wife of yours doesn’t bear a daughter? What will you do then, eh? Steal into her bedchamber every nine months? And who’s to mind Izu when you’re away? Those Soras and Inoues are back to squabbling like old hens. Don’t look to me to shut them up. I’m too old for that nonsense, and even if I weren’t, their houses outrank mine.”

  He was right. Worse yet, even on his deathbed he could summon more vigor than Daigoro could manage at the moment. An aging tiger was still a tiger. All Daigoro wanted was to lie down and sleep.

  “I saw no other choice,” he said at last. “Yasuda-sama, you must understand: if I hadn’t relinquished my name, my whole family might already be dead.”

  “So what is it you prefer? To see your name dishonored? To see your mother saddled with more responsibility than she can bear?”

  Daigoro smiled—a sad smile, but it was genuine, the first one in many days. “You never were one for small talk, were you, Yasuda-sama?”

  “You stop it with that sama nonsense. She’s not well, Okuma-dono. You know that better than anyone.”

  Daigoro nodded. “In fact, she’s the reason I came here to speak with you.”

  “There’s talk of some general from Kyoto wanting to marry her. Is that true?”

  “That’s what I’ve come to prevent.”

  “Then go back to your family. Reclaim your title.”

  “If I do that, the general doesn’t need to marry her; he’ll just kill her, and the rest of my house too. You don’t know this man, Yasuda-sama. He isn’t bound to the code as we are. He’s mad.”

  Yasuda nodded weakly. “Then come at him from a position of strength. Your own position, the position of your birthright. Let a widow mourn the passing of her husband. Let a mother mourn the death of her eldest son. And if death comes, then such is a samurai’s lot. Die in your rightful stead, Okuma-dono.”

  “No. I was no good at governance even while I had name and station. Let the other lords protector manage Izu’s affairs while my mother grieves. Surely they owe my family that much.”

  Yasuda coughed, snorted, and spat a wad of mucus into a red-lacquered bowl held by a serving girl. “What they owe is one thing,” he said. “How little they can get away with repaying is something else again. Someone has got to mind the difference between the two, and doing that will demand more vigilance than your mother can spare.”

  “Yes. I was rather hoping I might ask a Yasuda to hold things together.”

  Lord Yasuda had another coughing fit. His face flushed, and the little veins visibly bulged in his temples. Whether it was from the coughing or emotional agitation, Daigoro couldn’t say.

  “I told you already,” Yasuda said, “it’s beyond my reach. Too old. Too man
y other things to worry about. This devil besetting my lungs isn’t the least of my problems, but it isn’t the greatest either.”

  “I did not presume to saddle you with this burden, Yasuda-sama. I had your youngest son in mind.”

  “Kenbei? He’s responsible enough, I’ll grant you, but none of the other lords will listen to him. Izu looks to House Yasuda for strength and defense, not for fair minds and level heads. And we don’t look to the Inoues or Soras either, that’s for damned certain. We look to House Okuma.”

  The devil, as Yasuda called it, possessed his lungs again, and he had to spit five times into the serving girl’s bowl before he could rest his heavy head back on his pillow.

  “Izu looks to House Okuma,” Daigoro said, “and now House Okuma looks to the house of Yasuda Kenbei. I have surrendered my title as lord protector; I can only ask you as a friend. Will you help me? Will you speak to your son for me?”

  “Nothing would please me more. If my Kenbei were to marry your mother, your enemy would have no recourse but to accept it. But Kenbei is already married, and his wife is at least as dangerous as this madman in Kyoto. They called your father the Red Bear of Izu, but let me tell you, they should have given that nickname to her instead. That woman is a bear if ever there was one.”

  Daigoro grinned. “Direct as ever, Yasuda-sama.”

  “Wait until you’re my age and then see how much time you have for dithering.” Lord Yasuda hacked and spat. “You’re a clever boy, Okuma-dono. And this fever addles an old man’s brain. You did not have Kenbei in mind, neh? You spoke of his house, not Kenbei himself.”

  “Yes, sir. Perhaps someone younger—and someone not married to a bear.”

  “Inventive thinking. Just like your father.”

  Daigoro felt his face flush. On any other day he would have enjoyed the compliment to his father. On any other day being likened to his father would have filled him with the warm glow of pride. On this night he could enjoy neither. He could only wonder if his father would have condoned his wife’s marriage to another house, or whether he would approve of his son pawning her off as a political ploy.