Blood Ninja (37 page)

“But … Shusaku will be killed. Have you gone mad?”

“Shusaku deserves to die.”

“You don’t still think he killed Mara?”

Kawabata laughed dismissively. “No, you blundering ox. I know
who killed Mara. Do you imagine this is the first time I have sent Lord Oda a secret message?”

A sharp intake of breath. “Have you lost your senses? You killed the woman you say you loved! And now you betray Lord Toku—”

There was a flat report that Little Kawabata recognized as a slap. Abruptly, his mother stopped crying
. “Only I have been betrayed!”
his father screamed
.

Little Kawabata let his weight fall against the wall. Shusaku hadn’t killed the girl called Mara, had
never
killed her. Everything he had thought was a lie. Mara had died because of his own father, and her only crime had been to choose Shusaku instead of him
.

His father was a
murderer.

From the other side of the rock, the sobbing started again
.

“Silence,” said Little Kawabata’s father to his mother. “Or I’ll kill you, too.”

Heiko, Yukiko, and Hiro insisted on going too, of course. Shusaku tried to resist it, but he knew that a bond had been formed among the young people, and that the trip would offer many opportunities for training.

They wasted no time in gathering supplies for the three-day walk to Lord Oda’s castle. They dressed in the simple unornamented garb of peasants, stowing black ninja clothes and scarves in shoulder bags. Shusaku chose for each of them a sharp
wakizashi
, short enough to be easily hidden in the folds of their clothes, and he also packed blowpipes, darts, and miniature bombs.

I’m a ninja now
, thought Taro. At one time the thought might have filled him with horror, or with a frisson of illicit excitement. Now, as he watched Shusaku select weapons to be concealed about their persons, he felt only a dull hope that the preparations would be enough to guarantee the death of the treacherous Lord Oda.

Finally, everything was ready. It was as they were about to enter
the tunnel to the hut that Kawabata came waddling toward them, an angry expression on his face.

“What is it?” asked Shusaku, impatient.

“My son has gone.” Kawabata ran his eyes over them. “Do you have him?”

“
Have
him? No. You think I would take him from you?”

Kawabata sneered. “You have taken things from me before.” He sounded truculent, like a child denied a favorite food.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Shusaku. “But I can tell you that I have not kidnapped your son.”

Kawabata’s anger did not diminish, but he did lower his shoulders wearily. “No. I see that.” Then he turned on Taro. “This is
your
fault,” he spat.

“Taro hasn’t kidnapped him either,” said Shusaku, in a voice that was half a sigh.

“No. But he beat him, and then he turned him. He has corrupted the boy, made him weak. How do you think it must have affected him, to lose the fight, and then to be denied the death that should have followed?”

Taro stared at the man. “Are you saying … you would rather he had died?”

“Of course. Better death than dishonor. He is a loser, and you have forced him to live with that knowledge.”

Taro blinked. There was nothing he could say to this. When he had been young, he had loved to hear stories of adventure and honor. Now it seemed to him that honor was often just an excuse for cruelty, a way for the strong to bully the weak. He turned away from Kawabata. “Let’s go,” he said.

Shusaku nodded, stepping into the tunnel.

“If you should come across him …,” said Kawabata.

Taro paused. Could it be that Kawabata was really concerned about the boy?

“… tell him not to come back,” the fat man finished.

Taro turned his back on the man, sickened.

Starlight washed the dark mountain air as they picked their way over the mountain pass leading back to the wide plain, and beyond it to Lord Oda’s castle in the town of Nagoya.

“Our target is in the fourth tower,” said Shusaku as he crossed a small stream. “It’s the hardest part of the castle to access. There is a spiral staircase in the European style, so that it can be easily defended from above.”

“Guards?” asked Hiro.

“Many. Also, Lord Oda has hired the services of a ninja called Namae to protect the tower. I’ve encountered him before. The man is a ghost—he appears and disappears like mist. Where he goes, he leaves corpses strewn behind him. He’s dangerous.”

Coming from Shusaku, that meant something.

“Can we get past him?” asked Yukiko.

“
We
can’t. But Taro can.”

Yukiko stared. “He isn’t fully trained!”

Shusaku smiled. “He doesn’t have to be. You see, Namae can
guard the tower only at
night
. He’s meant to be a protection against ninja.”

Yukiko gasped. “Taro can sneak in during the day!”

“But what if Oda isn’t there in the daytime?” asked Taro. “What if I get in and he’s out somewhere?”

“My employer informs me that the target will be there,” said Shusaku. “Oda is afraid to leave the castle. He feels that the fourth tower offers the best insurance against attack.”

Taro felt a sort of nauseous excitement bubbling inside him. He couldn’t wait to face the man who had ordered his assassination, whose pawns had killed Taro’s father. And there was something else, too. Something he would never dare to put into words, or even think too clearly, for fear that just by articulating it he could somehow lose the woman who he still thought of as mother.

But the thought was there, even if it was quiet and as shadowy as a fox in the night of his mind.
Lady Tokugawa is staying at Lord Oda’s castle. What if she is my real mother, the one who gave birth to me, and what if I get to meet her?

For a moment Taro allowed an image to rise up in his mind—an image of himself standing before a woman who resembled him, who had the same fine features and gray eyes. Perhaps, for the first time, he would belong.

But he chased away the corrupting dream. He
did
belong, wherever his own mother was, wherever she had hidden herself after the attack on the village. Shusaku’s pigeon had still not come, bringing news of her, but he had not given up hope.

Kill Lord Oda
, he told himself,
then go and find her, whether the pigeon has arrived or not
.

His thoughts revolved in this way for many burned incense sticks, never allowing him a moment’s peace. Daylight found them in a hunters’ hut high up in the mountains. When night fell, they descended from the hills into lower ground, crossing arable land that felt dreadfully exposed to Taro, until they entered the wide open plain leading to Nagoya Castle, which they had crossed in the opposite direction what seemed a lifetime ago.

With all that he knew about Lord Oda now, Taro felt that the empty huts had taken on a new, sinister meaning. What before he had taken for the effects of war seemed instead a warning, communicating to any visitors the depth of Lord Oda’s contempt for those in his care.

However, whatever else the empty huts may have meant, they also meant shelter, and as the sky to the east was already paling with the first signs of dawn, Shusaku led them through various fields and small hamlets. As the first rays of dawn suffused the landscape, they came upon a young deer. Taro shot it down with a dart, and he and Shusaku shared its blood before handing the carcass to Hiro to carry and cook later on a fire for the others. Not long afterward they found an abandoned place in which they could sleep for the day.

As they settled down on the hard ground, and Shusaku pinned black silk
hakama
to the windows with daggers, in order to keep out the light, Taro looked about him and felt almost content. Hiro was building a fire in the corner, ready to prepare the deer’s meat. As he worked, he looked up at Taro and smiled.

Taro smiled back. He had not realized how much, in the mountaintop lair, he had felt trapped and confined, a feeling that had reached its apogee in the rice store, when Little Kawabata had locked him in. Here, he was a part of the landscape, grass for his pillow, the moon for a lamp. And he was with four people he knew, and trusted, and liked.

It was the next evening as they set out that he began to feel uneasy. Coming after the solitude of the high places, the great flattened bowl of the plain before Nagoya Castle, with its fields and croaking frogs and plumes of smoke rising here and there into the too-wide air, seemed an expanse in which it was possible to be trapped in another way—spotted by enemies, and then encircled, with nowhere to hide.

“It feels like the land itself is against us,” said Yukiko.

Taro nodded. They were standing on the road to Nagoya, and it was clear that the others shared his trepidation. “It’s Oda’s land,
that’s why,” he said. “It doesn’t want us here.” As he spoke, a crow cawed loudly, wheeling above their heads.

Shusaku shook his head. “The land will love us for freeing it from Oda’s rule. It is on our side.”

Taro was grateful to the ninja for saying it, but he was not convinced. The wind was soughing in the bamboo and the leaves, and he could almost have believed that it was the wasted land itself uttering this terrible noise. The entire landscape seemed possessed of a sort of ancient, idiot sentience. The trees took on the shapes of creatures, and the whistling of the wind seemed to issue from the very throat of the fields, a low keening, meaningless and malignant.

Above it all rose the hill of Nagoya, overlooking the cruelly abandoned valley like a baleful eye. The quickest way forward was the straight road that led to the town, and, disguised as they were as simple peasants, Shusaku led the way onto it. Taro looked around nervously at the fields surrounding them, at the broad and empty road before them, its straightness affording anyone coming from either direction a good view of the group, and from some distance away.

He felt too exposed. In the light of the stars and moon the waterlogged rice fields seemed a shimmering sea, and on it the five of them seemed small and vulnerable, too visible to predators, even if some of them were predators themselves. Taro felt as they entered the inland sea of light that they were so small and insignificant that a net might at any time close about them, seizing them all together, and a rough hand throw them on the black sand of some terrible shore.

“Well,” said Heiko, “we can turn around now. Or we can go through with this, and you can avenge your father, Taro.”

“I’m not turning back,” said Hiro. Taro felt his heart swell with pride in his friend, and already the landscape before him seemed less formidable. “If anyone sees us,” Hiro continued, “we will look like peasants. And anyway, they won’t be expecting us to have two girls with us.” He looked at Yukiko. “Having you here
is a good disguise. I knew you couldn’t be
completely
useless.”

Yukiko rolled her eyes. “Don’t think I’ll hesitate to say that you kidnapped me as a hostage.”

Taro and Heiko exchanged a smile. If they did come across Kenji Kira, or any of Lord Oda’s ninja, then Taro knew at least he didn’t need to worry about Hiro and Yukiko.

Actually he was more worried about anyone who felt it wise to fight them.

The matter of turning around or not turning around settled, they set out along the road. It was after they had been walking for perhaps four incense sticks that they passed a peasant couple, pulling a small cart on which had been piled what looked like their possessions. Shusaku turned to look at them but said nothing.

Half an incense stick later, they came upon another family, fleeing toward the mountains.

As they passed, Shusaku bowed to them in greeting. “Trouble ahead?” he asked.

The peasants seemed fearful, their heads turning this way and that in quick, sharp, saccadic movements, like the heads of crows. “A
kyuuketsuki
,” the man whispered.

Shusaku started, and the man took this as alarm. “You could always turn back,” he said.

“No,” said Shusaku. “We need to reach Nagoya.”

The man shrugged. “As you wish.”

He began to walk again, but Shusaku stopped him. “What makes you think there’s a
kyuuketsuki
?” he asked.

“Up ahead. A man was bitten. His body was left on the roadside. In plain view!”

Shusaku looked at Taro, and Taro could guess what he was thinking. Subterfuge was to ninja what heat was to a sword smith—they could not work without it. To leave a body by the roadside did not sound like the mark of a ninja. “This person who was killed,” said Shusaku. “He had two puncture wounds?”

“Yes. On the neck.”