Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  Halfway back to the horses still tied to the gates, Daigoro’s throbbing hands prompted him to wonder why he hadn’t walked the horse to the saddle instead of lugging the saddle to the horse. His mind was as exhausted as his body; his thoughts plodded along as if wading against an undertow.

  “Who’s your friend?” Katsushima asked when Daigoro reached his mare.

  “He is of the Wind,” Daigoro said, laughing weakly. “The Wind is without name.”

  Katsushima’s eyes narrowed, and the smile of a proud father played at the corners of his mouth. “You found them.”

  “I did.”

  Katsushima looked at the shinobi with new eyes. “Whatever your name is, Wind-sama, I thank you for saving my good friend’s life.”

  The ninja’s only response was to grunt as he heaved his saddle up over his saddle blanket. If Daigoro hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn his shinobi was actually fatigued.

  “How did you find me?” Daigoro asked.

  “I was on my way to your family’s place when I heard the commotion,” Katsushima said. I never expected to find you here. I thought I had a few days’ lead on you on the Tokaido.”

  “We came by ship.”

  “Did you?” Katsushima whistled. “You weathered an unholy bitch of a storm.”

  “A Toyotomi blockade too. Shichio’s men are watching every last pebble of coastline.”

  “Then we’re apt to find many more of them when we reach your mother’s house.”

  Daigoro gave him a long, studious look. His friend looked back down at him, red spatter dotting his woolly sideburns. An hour’s conversation passed between them in that single glance. Then Daigoro made a final adjustment to the girth, and with energy reserves he didn’t even know he had, he stepped up into the saddle.

  Katsushima had to dismount to lash Daigoro’s right leg in place, and even then Daigoro felt on the verge of sliding off his horse. His own saddle, the precious one Old Yagyu had fashioned for him, was many ri behind him. Sitting in an ordinary saddle, the weight of Daigoro’s left leg threatened to drag him down and his right leg wasn’t strong enough to counteract it. He could only stay ahorse by balancing there, the muscles of his belly, chest, and back shifting constantly, as if he were an acrobat on the tip of a pole. It was exhausting even when his horse was standing still, and impossible at a full gallop.

  It was necessary, then, that Katsushima lash down his right leg. Nevertheless, Daigoro could not help thinking that usually it was the injured and dying who were tied into the saddle. When at last they set out on the road, his coal black mare shied from the twitching of pained, bloodied men, nearly throwing him. Only by gripping the saddlehorn with both hands did he manage to stay mounted.

  But soon the miasma of battle was behind them and Daigoro could settle into a rhythm. “If I didn’t know better,” Katsushima told him, “I’d swear you just stole a horse.”

  “Lord Yasuda knows I’m good for it,” Daigoro said defensively, realizing only too late that his friend was kidding him. “I apologize, Goemon. I’m too tired to think. Why did you ever come back? Why do you want to have anything to do with me?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I can’t even imagine.”

  Katsushima’s wry smirk faded away. “How did we meet?”

  “You dueled my brother.”

  “And then?”

  “You dueled me.”

  “Almost,” said Katsushima. “We had tea first. Then dinner. Then we talked all night, at your insistence. ‘I want to discuss swordsmanship with you, and bushido as well.’ That’s what you said.”

  Daigoro nodded. Even through the haze of fatigue, he could recall Katsushima’s response: I expect we have much to learn from each other.

  “So let’s discuss,” Katsushima said. “Bushido demands that you fight even against impossible odds, neh?”

  Daigoro nodded.

  “To describe your odds of besting Shichio as ‘impossible’ seems blithely optimistic to me. Would you agree?”

  Daigoro nodded. It was easier than talking; the jostling of his saddle did most of the work.

  “So why not give up bushido? Following it is certain to kill you. You gave up your name. It only makes sense to free yourself of the rest.”

  Daigoro nodded again—due more to the rocking motion of his horse than to his own agreement. But Katsushima wasn’t wrong either. Not entirely.

  “A ronin keeps his swords and throws the rest aside,” Katsushima said. “Duty, family, lord, name, honor; they’re shackles. All you have to do is give up the shackles and you’ll be free.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? You’ve already given up the ones you value most.”

  “Yes,” Daigoro said. “I’ve surrendered my family and with them my name. I have no other lord—save Izu herself, perhaps, but without my title I’ve abandoned her too. With every sacrifice I feel I’ve done what honor demands, but my only reward is to be hunted like a traitor and a criminal. There’s no honor in that. I have no honor left.”

  “Then what else remains?”

  “Duty.”

  “To whom?”

  “To my father’s memory. To what little sense of family I still have left. To bushido itself.”

  “Your father’s gone, Daigoro. When you gave up your name you gave up your family too. Why not shed the last of your shackles?”

  It sounded so inviting. Done properly, it might even end the feud with Shichio. He could give up being samurai. Put down the burden of his father’s sword. Make an obsequious and public apology. Cut off his topknot and go home unmolested. Comfort his mother. Share Akiko’s bed. Be there for the birth of his child.

  He could have had everything he wanted, and all he had to do was betray his code. “I can’t,” he said, near to tears. “I can’t give up duty. I don’t know how.”

  “That is why I follow you.”

  58

  There was no shore party to greet him when Shichio made his landing at the Okuma jetty. In any other circumstances, failure to send an honor guard for the great Toyotomi no Hideyoshi might have got a daimyo and his family crucified. (Though not a convert to the southern barbarians’ religion, Hashiba found their religion’s obsession with crucifixion quite exotic. It had become his favorite method of execution.) But today the Okuma clan would receive a pardon, not because their honored guests had come unannounced—they should have seen Hashiba’s flagship from ten ri away—but because it was Shichio’s wedding day, and that had the regent feeling jovial.

  The bile rose in Shichio’s throat when he remembered his last visit to this wretched place. He’d left the Okuma compound in disgrace, no thanks to that giant pig Mio. Shichio would have thought the fat man’s precious bushido code would have forbidden throwing a fight to a cripple.

  Shichio supposed he owed the fat man a debt of gratitude. If it weren’t for his superhuman endurance—if he hadn’t survived long enough to reveal Shichio’s designs for marriage—the Bear Cub might never have approached the Wind, and then Shichio’s informant could never have betrayed the boy. He knew now that his assassin had failed; the absence of a second communiqué proved the first message was false. But it was enough just to learn that the boy had made contact with the Wind. Shichio had stepped up his wedding plans, while the Bear Cub must surely have gone to ground. That typhoon had forced even Hashiba’s flagship into port. No cripple could withstand it.

  Shichio touched his hair, which was behaving peevishly in this all-pervading heat. He stepped out of the launch to walk side by side with Hashiba down the jetty toward the palanquin. Once inside, he carefully brushed all the sand from his fine silk stockings and smooth wooden sandals. There was little sand on the jetty to begin with, but Shichio would abide no imperfections on this perfect day.

  As his palanquin rocked side to side with the footsteps of the bearers, Shichio looked out at the emerald tangle of kudzu strangling the black rocks. He wondered how long it would take him after the wedding
to sell his new holdings and buy an estate in the Kansai. Only barbarians could make a permanent home in Izu. The humidity alone was reason enough to leave and never come back.

  “What have you got in that scarf of yours?” Hashiba said, nodding at the little parcel Shichio unconsciously worked in his hands. It was wrapped in the finest Chinese silk, which did little to soften its horns, its teeth, its furrowed brow. Hashiba squinted at it, then laughed. “Well, I’m damned if I know what to get you for a wedding present. You name a gift that tops that mask and I’ll buy it.”

  Shichio felt himself wince and quickly converted it into a coy smile. He couldn’t let Hashiba see how he’d come to fear the mask, and yet he hadn’t been able to leave the mask in their cabin, either. He wished he had. So long as they were behind closed doors, it was enough to let Hashiba ravage him. It wasn’t hard to tempt him into being a little rough. The mask would not be sated, but it could be distracted.

  Shichio had wrapped it up in the hope that he could satisfy his unconscious need to hold it while avoiding the touch of its iron skin. He envied the mask; even in this heat, it would never sweat. He wanted nothing more than to disrobe it, to press its cool cheek against his own, but that was out of the question. This was no time to compromise self-control. He had a madwoman to bring to heel.

  Seeing Hashiba’s expectant look, he said, “Gifts be damned. And let the wedding and the wife be damned too. Once I have her name, my mask and I come back home to serve their rightful lord.”

  “Already thinking like a trueborn samurai,” Hashiba said with a wink. He smiled his impish, simian smile.

  The palanquin’s woven bamboo window screens were no proof against the sweat-stink of the bearers, who grunted in time with each other as they plodded up the cliffside trail. “These commoners smell like animals,” Shichio said, grimacing. A tiny part of his mind insisted that the bearers’ parents probably worked a farm no different from the one Shichio had grown up on, but he would not dwell on that. Soon enough he would have rank, name, station, and esteem. He would be above the commoners for ever after.

  At last the countless switchbacks took him to the top of the cliff trail, and through the window screen he could see the high white wall of the Okuma compound on his right. Soon to be my compound, he thought—very soon, in fact. That fact hung over him like the rain clouds he’d endured the day before, and so it was especially irksome to hear a runner coming from somewhere ahead. The man stopped to kneel beside the palanquin, panting like a horse. Delay after delay; it was the only way the lower classes could exert power over their betters.

  Shichio slammed the sliding door aside and looked down upon the messenger kneeling in the weeds. “What do you think you’re doing, stopping your lord on the way to his wedding?”

  The man bowed deeper. “General, your orders were to deliver any news of the Bear Cub, day or night.”

  The Bear Cub? How could any word of him have reached Izu already? Shichio’s fleet had been the first to set sail after that storm, and it should have swept up all other ships in its net. No horseman could have outrun them.

  He looked down at the mute messenger. “Well? Spit it out, boy.”

  “My lord, the Bear Cub stormed the Yasuda compound last night. We lost fifty men.”

  “Fifty?”

  “He was said to have a rider with him. A ronin of some years.”

  “No,” said Shichio. His spies on the Tokaido had reported that Daigoro and his haggard bodyguard had split ways at least a week past. His agent within the Wind said the boy had been alone when he hired his retinue to spirit him to Izu.

  But this was not the first fantastic tale to have reached Shichio’s ears. Just this very morning a skiff had come alongside Hashiba’s flagship, delivering word that the Bear Cub had stolen a frigate after slaughtering the entire crew. It was preposterous, of course. Yes, the Okumas were a coastal power, but the boy was a cripple, not a seaman, and each of Shichio’s vessels was teeming with armed men. The whelp would need an army of pirates at his command. The tale was so ludicrous that Shichio had ordered a broadside into the skiff that delivered the message. He would have sunk the bastards for their cheek had Hashiba not heard the sudden cannonade and ordered a cease-fire.

  Out of sheer magnanimity Shichio chose not to kill this messenger either. “The Yasuda garrison is playing tricks on you,” he told the kneeling man. “They take advantage of your gullibility.”

  “My lord, they were most explicit: a young boy with an odachi and a lame leg—”

  “Quit while you still have a tongue in your mouth.” Shichio had a sudden vision of blood oozing from the messenger’s mouth, and he realized his fingers had worked their way under the folds of Chinese silk. He was touching the mask.

  He withdrew his hand as if the mask had bitten it. Hashiba frowned at him but said nothing. Shichio banged on the roof and the stinking, sweating bearers resumed their march.

  When he reached the gate, Shichio was pleased by what he saw. House Okuma commanded a grand vista. Katto-ji, home to the abbot he was soon to kill, peered out from the pines on the next summit to the north. Below, on the saddle between the peaks, a double garrison was camped along the road flying Toyotomi colors. That road and the jetty were the only ways to reach the Okuma compound. Rumors be damned, Shichio thought. He would believe his eyes before he believed tales of captured frigates and samurai heroics, and his eyes saw no corpses lining the road, nor any pirate vessels anchored in the bay.

  Just inside the gates, Okuma warriors formed columns of red and brown, their bear paw crests fluttering overhead on their banners. Opposite them stood a wall of soldiers in mossy green, with a fat white centipede winding its way up the length of each green banner. He remembered that crest from his intelligence reports: House Yasuda. He wondered how low a clan had to sink before it took a wriggling insect as its sigil.

  In the center stood his bride, the Lady Yumiko, cradling an infant. Shichio remembered hearing the Bear Cub’s wife was with child. That wedding must have been rushed along by spearheads if the cub’s child was already born. Again exercising his generosity, Shichio decided he would let his new bride coddle her grandson for a few minutes before ordering the wedding to commence. He was happy to see the woman sober enough to stand. If even half of the rumors that reached him were true, she spent her days either sedated by poppy’s tears or wailing and running about like a hungry ghost.

  The primary reason Shichio had cajoled Hashiba into coming with him was not to have his friend, lord, and lover by his side on his wedding day, but to guarantee that the wedding would take place. The matron of House Okuma had yet to respond to a single one of Shichio’s marriage proposals, and he needed a contingency plan if she chose to remain mute when her would-be husband arrived. That was where Hashiba came in: he could simply order her to marry Shichio. But seeing Lady Yumiko in her bridal dress, with her attendants and even the attendants of neighboring houses arrayed to honor the occasion, Shichio could see her will had finally caved.

  “My lord regent,” he heard a familiar voice say, “and General Shichio too, what a pleasant surprise! You honor House Okuma with your attendance.”

  Shichio stepped out of the palanquin and looked over the top of it. There stood the Bear Cub’s tall, lean bodyguard, the one with the bushy sideburns and tousled paintbrush of a topknot—Katsuhara, Shichio thought his name was, or Katsushira, something like that. He stood just inside the Okuma gate, looking tired and gray and not at all like a proper attendee at a wedding. Shichio expected no more of the man; he’d always struck Shichio as common.

  “Why, we’re just as surprised to see you, aren’t we?” Shichio said. He set the mask in the palanquin; shabby though he was, the ronin was dangerous, and Shichio needed to keep his wits. “Word reached me that you abandoned your little cub in his hour of need—and now here you are at his homestead. Fickle, aren’t you? One who lacked manners might ask whether you had impure designs on the boy’s mother.”

  “His designs
on my mother are pure enough,” said the voice Shichio hated most in the world.

  The Bear Cub stepped out from the midst of the Okuma column, pallid as a corpse but somehow still standing. It was impossible. Every path to the compound was under watch. But there he was, with that long and lovely sword slung across his back. Its tsuba and pommel glittered in the morning sun.

  The boy bowed deeply, and Shichio responded with the slightest dip of his chin. “I bow to your superior,” the Bear Cub said, and Shichio turned back around to see Hashiba had hopped out of the palanquin.

  “Ah!” said Hashiba, marching around so that he could see the gathering; he was too short to see over the palanquin. “An honor guard after all! I was beginning to think you’d lost your manners, Daigoro-san.”

  “The honor guard is my mother’s,” said that odious voice, “and she and I beg your pardon alike. We did not know you were coming, my lord regent.”

  “Forget it,” Hashiba said, waving his hand as if shooing off a butterfly. He inhaled deeply, flaring the nostrils in his too-flat nose, and clapped his hands against his breastplate with a grandiose and flippant air. “Smell that breeze from the sea! So different from Kyoto.”

  Daigoro stepped forward to usher Hashiba inside the compound. Shichio noticed the boy’s limp was much more pronounced than he’d seen before. “Why, young Daigoro,” he said. “You seem to be limping more than usual, my lad. Is your infirmity growing worse?”

  “I took a wound to the leg last night.”

  “Ah, yes. Getting out of bed, was it? What a trial it must be, being unable to do all the things the rest of us take for granted.”

  “It was a sword wound,” said the whelp, grinding his teeth.

  “Was it indeed? Can the rumors of your assault on the Yasuda compound be true? Do tell me who cut you; I shall have to decide whether to promote him or to chastise him for not cutting deeper.”

  “You needn’t burden yourself with such difficult decisions. He’s dead now.”