Winter Raven

by Adam Baker

  The girl said nothing. She pushed the plate of pastries aside.

  ‘I heard a similar story concerning the battle of Kurobe River. Following the defeat of General Akitane, his family and retainers killed themselves aboard a ship. The ship burned then sank to the bottom of the sea. Again, I can’t help but wonder if there were survivors.

  ‘I understand your position,’ said the captain. ‘As long as you remain without a name, you are free, undefined. No one has a hold on you. But your circumstances have changed, your life hangs in the balance. Yes, you are just a girl but they’ll execute you anyway. If you have a noble family name, now is the time to invoke it and beg for mercy. Think it over. But don’t take too long. Wheels are turning. Your fate will decided in the coming hours.

  ‘Your companion, the samurai,’ the captain continued, sipping his tea, ‘I don’t believe he’s your natural father. There is little resemblance between you. How long has he been your protector? I haven’t seen him in combat but I can tell, just by looking at the man, he would be a formidable foe. So who is he? Tell me his name.’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘I’ll say it again: you need to understand the consequence of your silence. You’ve been held in a cell these past few days partly for your own protection. What if you are handed to my men? It’s happened before. Women, common criminals, held in the barracks for the amusement of the troops. Held for weeks. Beaten. Teeth knocked out. Fucked until they can no longer walk.

  ‘Your loyalty to the man is commendable. How long has he looked after you? Months? Years? But you need to understand the next time you see him it will be the day of his execution. I admire him. His single-minded pursuit of honour is the mark of a true samurai. But it is, by its nature, a selfish outlook. You travelled with him, washed his clothes, cooked his food. You sacrificed the opportunity to be a wife, a mother. And what is you reward, now he is gone? If he truly cares for you, which I’m sure he does, he would want you to leave his service and have a life.’

  No reply.

  ‘Is this some strange act of love for him? You think the pain, the degradation you will receive at the hands of my men are some weird consummation? You will be disabused of that notion after five minutes on your back. The agony will be real and overwhelming. You will beg for mercy, but it will be too late.’

  The captain’s face grew hard, as if he reached the limit of the time he wished to waste on the girl.

  ‘It’s time. This is the moment you choose life or death. What’s it to be, girl? Do you want to live? Or do you want to die a broken whore?’

  The girl said nothing.

  The captain sighed and turned away from her. ‘I see your choice is made. Return to your cell and pray.’ He clapped his hands and the girl was led away.

  * * *

  The girl stood at the cell window and gripped the bars. She gazed at the camphor tree at the edge of the courtyard and tried to impress every detail of the scene to her memory. The texture of the bark. Branches against a grey sky. She wanted to hold this serene moment in her heart and use it as a refuge. Whatever happened to her in the coming hours, whatever pain and humiliations she had to endure, she would project herself back into this courtyard. She would walk the cobbled half-acre in solitude and look up at scudding autumn skies.

  The captain was summoned to the small cloistered quadrangle beside the Imperial library. The cloisters enclosed a petrified garden arranged to suggest the abstracted textures of nature. Jagged, igneous boulders sat bedded in moss – islands in a sea of raked gravel. The landscape was tended each sunrise by a monk who sat and contemplated the harmonious composition of the garden before picking up his rake and sculpting a pattern of fine furrows. Each sweeping stroke of the rake erased the previous day’s design and created fresh, elegant swirls which would themselves be erased the following morning.

  The nun knelt on flagstones. She held a brush and a cup of water. She wrote prayers with deft strokes of the brush then sat back and watched the words slowly evaporate.

  ‘Join me,’ she said, without looking up.

  The captain of the guard stood at a respectful distance, keeping his back straight and his gaze fixed straight ahead. The nun was a black shadow in the periphery of his vision.

  ‘I wanted to speak to you about the assassin.’

  ‘He has yet to talk,’ said the captain.

  ‘What do your instincts tell you?’

  ‘I continue to believe he acted alone.’

  ‘What is his condition?’

  ‘Poor. He sustained a severe injury during capture and required radical surgery. It will be days before he is strong enough to be interrogated at length.’

  ‘Tell Saracen to keep the prisoner alive.’

  ‘I’m sure your interest in the matter will sharpen his mind.’

  ‘Feed the prisoner well. I want him returned to full health.’

  ‘There was a box among his possessions. It contained medicine. Purgatives. Poppy. He has some kind of underlying sickness. Something severe. Something incurable.’

  ‘But his mind. His mind and will are intact?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The captain was intrigued to hear the nun pursue the subject of the samurai. The assassination attempt had been audacious and nearly worked. But it wasn’t the first attempt to murder the Emperor and it wouldn’t be the last. From the outset it had been clear the samurai acted alone, pursuing a personal vendetta. His actions had no strategic implications and the nun had plenty of other matters of state to occupy her thoughts.

  ‘I wonder why he wants me dead,’ she mused. ‘Revenge for the death of his master, whoever that might have been. Hardly narrows it down.’

  ‘You wish to discuss the details of his execution?’ asked the captain. ‘Something public? Something severe?’

  The nun dipped her brush and wrote dream on the flagstone in front of her. She watched the brush-strokes quickly fade to nothing.

  ‘Actually, there has been a change of plan.’

  Saracen entered the cell and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. He knelt beside the samurai. The injured man lay on his cot, naked except for a soiled fundoshi and a blood-mottled shoulder bandage where his right arm used to be. He shivered, his body glazed with sweat. He was lost in delirium. His unfocused eyes stared through and beyond the ceiling of the cell like he could see through the clouds, through the sky, deep into the cosmic gulfs.

  Saracen understood pain. He had, in his role as palace physician, knelt beside many men in the grip of a terrible illness. It put them beyond reach. No words, no comfort could penetrate their tormented fever-dreams. They were alone in hell. When his own time came, when the final sickness settled upon him, he had resolved to follow the advice of Marcus Aurelius and open his wrists. He would die calm and self-possessed like a true Stoic.

  It had been a quick amputation. Saracen had dosed the samurai with juiced poppy leaves. The samurai raised his head and drank the bitter spoonful too sick to understand what was about to happen. When he was fully stupefied the jailer and guards held him down while Saracen sawed through his arm. He screamed and tried to wrestle himself free but they held him pinned. His blood vessels were cauterised with a hot iron rod, his wound sewn shut with silk and disinfected with white mercury salt. Later his rotted arm had been thrown in a refuse basket beside the kitchens where it lay among fish heads, egg shells and onion skins ready to be hauled to a waste pit at the edge of the city. The limb would most likely be scavenged and gnawed by wild dogs.

  The samurai lay half way between life and death. Saracen waited to see if the man would rally or succumb.

  The samurai’s left hand crawled across his chest like a spider, fingers scrabbling towards his right shoulder. The physician watched in fascination as the fingers, seemingly operating under their own volition, pulled bandages aside and began to pick at the stitches holding the stump-flap closed. Nails tore at the stitches as if, somewhere in the depths of his fever, the samurai wanted to rip open the wound and
bleed out. The physician turned and addressed the jailer.

  ‘We need to tie him down.’

  * * *

  The samurai looked down at his body lashed to the cot by strips of blanket. He craned to see the stump where his arm used to be.

  ‘Kill me. If you have an ounce of compassion, kill me now. Use poison. Put it in my food, my drink. No one will ever know.’

  Saracen smiled, lifted a bowl to the samurai’s lips and gave him a sip of broth.

  * * *

  The captain of the guard entered the cell, flanked by two sentries each ready to draw and strike if the samurai made a move to attack though it was immediately apparent the maimed man presented no threat to anyone.

  The samurai lay on his cot. He was no longer tied. The captain checked him over. The prisoner was gaunt and broken. His hauteur, his fearless determination, had been extinguished. He was nothing. He was hollow-eyed with exhaustion, no longer a formidable warrior but an old man.

  ‘Sit.’

  The samurai slowly swung his legs from the cot and hauled himself to a sitting position.

  ‘Get up,’ commanded the captain.

  The samurai leant forward and tried to summon the strength to stand. The sight was pitiful. The captain reacted with anger and embarrassment.

  ‘Come on. Get up.’

  The samurai struggled to his feet, barely able to hold himself upright.

  ‘I bring instructions from the Emperor. Your life is forfeit. You are his instrument, to use any way he sees fit. You were, no doubt, hoping for a swift execution. However the Emperor orders you to live. You are to take an oath. You will make no further attempt on his life. You will swear not to harm him in any way. He has a task he wishes you to perform. You will complete this task. Only then are you permitted the luxury of death.’

  The samurai was shaken by a wracking cough and steadied himself against the wall.

  ‘Do you understand?’ demanded the captain. ‘Answer me.’

  ‘Kill me. Just kill me.’

  ‘No. You will live. And you will fight for us. That is your punishment.’

  ‘I’ll never be your plaything. Rather die a thousand times.’

  ‘Look out of the window,’ said the captain.

  The samurai shuffled to the window and looked through the bars. The girl was manacled to the scaffold at the centre of the courtyard, her arms hoisted above her head by chains. An executioner stood ready with a knife.

  ‘Observe the shadow of the camphor tree,’ said the captain. ‘When the shadow touches the wall, the executioner will begin to cut. He will take her apart, piece at a time.’

  The shadow of the furthermost branch was a hand’s span from the wall. The girl was terrified but tried to suppress any outward sign of fear.

  The samurai gripped the window bars for support. He watched the narrow strip of sunlight between the branch shadow and the wall slowly shrink to nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ said the captain, as if replying to the samurai’s unspoken thoughts. ‘You shouldn’t have involved the girl. It has left you vulnerable. But it’s too late now. So swear. For her sake and yours.’

  The executioner paced the square. He checked the tree shadow and adjusted his grip on the knife. The girl closed her eyes and turned her face to the sky like she was determined to relish the breeze one last time.

  ‘All right,’ whispered the samurai. ‘I’ll take your oath.’

  Commander Raku, accompanied by two trusted swordsmen, breasted a hill and looked down on the rooftops of Kyoto. The swordsmen were brothers: Tadasue and Tadatoo. They wore civilian clothes.

  Wood smoke drifted over houses, temples, and the vast grounds of the Imperial Palace. Raku looked down on the palace and, to the east, the Shōgun’s mansion. Kyoto would be his home, he suspected, in years to come. Once General Motohide had consolidated his rule in Etchū he would need to establish a permanent ambassadorial outpost in the capital. He would need an astute representative, someone cunning yet unshakably loyal. Raku had little doubt he would be chosen to act as Motohide’s proxy. He had risen through the ranks and this would be his final reward: a mansion on the Suzaku Ōji; a chance to establish his own family name.

  Raku brought himself back to the present.

  ‘Keep it simple,’ he advised the brothers. ‘If anyone asks, tell them we’re here on a pilgrimage. We’re here to visit Ginkaku-ji. Don’t elaborate.’

  They passed the remains of the Rajōmon Gate and joined Suzaku Ōji riding the boulevard alongside foot traffic and merchant carts. The commander led the horsemen. He followed memorised directions to the house of Iezane.

  * * *

  Iezane was a prosperous man. He owned two saké breweries. He lived in a large house at the centre of Kyoto and had boosted his social standing by making ostentatious donations for the rebuilding of the Fushimi Inari shrine. He was also a tea merchant and brought bancha as well as the finest grades of Uji to the city. It was a trade that gave him access to the households of the city elite including the Imperial Palace itself, which was why he was a paid informant of General Motohide and why he had been instructed to provide a safe house for the commander and his men.

  The riders rode into the courtyard and dismounted. Servants took the reins and led the horses to nearby stables.

  ‘Summon your master.’

  Iezane didn’t look pleased to see them. While happy to take Motohide’s stipend, the reality of harbouring spies brought home the desperate risk he took by getting involved in intrigues against the Imperial House or Shōgunate. If his treason were discovered he could expect to be executed and his family stripped of all possessions. If the Emperor or Shōgun felt the need to make a public example of him a gang of labourers might be dispatched to raze his house. The rubble and beams would be carried away in carts and there would be nothing left of his breweries, his tea warehouse or his palatial home but acres of raked earth.

  ‘Inside, quickly,’ he said, ushering them into the house, glancing anxiously through the courtyard gate to make sure they hadn’t being observed from the street.

  * * *

  Iezane showed the men to their rooms. Later they joined him for a meal of noodles and fish.

  ‘So,’ said the commander, when the maid was out of earshot. ‘You heard of General Motohide’s conquest of northern Etchū?’

  ‘News has reached Kyoto.’

  ‘What has been the reaction?’

  ‘Nobody cares about Etchū. It’s a small province far from here. If the Shōgun wished to go to war over the matter he would mobilise troops, requisition material. He hasn’t. It’s a local squabble. It means nothing.’

  ‘What are you hearing from your Imperial contacts?’

  ‘Nothing. As I say, no one cares.’

  ‘You supply the palace, neh? The households of their courtiers?’

  ‘I’m a tradesman. If I developed a sudden interest in politics they would drag me to a cell and start pulling fingernails.’

  The commander finished his meal and pushed the bowl aside.

  ‘Let’s try a different approach. You hear gossip, neh? You visit these noble households. Military. Imperial. You make deliveries, you accept payment. I assume the servants offer a little rudimentary hospitality. You sit in the kitchens, sip tea and talk with domestic staff.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must hear personal information, hints of scandal.’

  ‘Now and again.’

  ‘Good. You and I are going to draw up a list. Middle-ranking officers within the Imperial court. Anyone with a vice. Drink. Women. Something that might compromise their position. Something that might give us leverage.’

  Iezane thought it over, clearly relieved that he wouldn’t be engaging in espionage himself. He swirled tea in his bowl.

  ‘There are a couple of names that spring to mind,’ he said.

  Nightfall. Commander Raku prowled backstreets near the Rajōmon Gate. Light and laughter spilled from brothels and drinking dens.

  ‘T
he place used to belong to a fishmonger,’ Iezane had told him. ‘You can still see a fish painted on the door.’

  Raku found a tavern with the blistered, peeling image of a fish on the door and headed inside.

  He sat and sipped saké near the fire pit, acting casually like he’d stopped by for a contemplative drink, a chance to be alone with his thoughts. People came and went. Groups of boisterous, laughing men. No one paid him attention. He looked out the doorway and watched people in the street. A steady stream of exhausted traders wheeled their carts home.

  He glanced left; a half-open screen allowed him a glimpse of the next room. He watched five men playing an intense game of Chō-Han. The shaker was stripped to the waist, his chest etched with a carp tattoo. Raku wondered if the tavern was the headquarters of an underworld gang, each initiate branded with a fish. The shaker shook a bamboo cup, slammed it down and exposed dice.

  ‘Odd,’ he barked. A couple of the men scooped coins and quickly threw down a fresh stake. Another brisk shake and roll.

  ‘Even.’

  The game began again. The men stared down at the dice mat, mesmerised by tumbling dice. They had untouched bowls of saké by their sides and a couple of them stroked amulets hung round their necks for luck.

  ‘Even.’

  A thug sat near the dealer eating dumplings, ready to step in and resolve any kind of dispute over the outcome of the game. It wasn’t unknown for a man to be overcome by despair following a losing streak. He might kick over tables and tear his clothes, sob about the money he lost, scream what a worthless husband and father he had been. He might even pull out a knife and threaten to slit his own throat. Such a man would be subdued with a gut punch and put outside in the alley. The recent prohibition of gambling made Chō-Han establishments wary of trouble. A patron was welcome to kill himself but not on the premises.