Child of Vengeance (41 page)

Fog had rolled in through the night, its thickness and depth such that it obscured the basin of the valley but left the peaks of the ridges where the boy now sat exposed. Bennosuke had not been able to sleep, clad in armor as he was. He had wandered up here in the darkness, as had other men, and together they had huddled, praying or sharpening swords or like him simply waiting and watching the hawk.

Somewhere, down in the mist below, there were two armies, from here invisible and the noise of them muffled. No one knew quite how many men were there; after a hundred and fifty thousand counting seemed pointless. Beyond that was a summoning of warriors the scale of which had not been seen before. It was everyone, ultimate, climactic.

A week ago no one had known the name Sekigahara, but it was here in this valley where the fate of Japan would be decided.

The hawk keened, a piercing sound that made Bennosuke shiver and gave him gooseflesh. Perhaps other men might have called such a cry portentous or auspicious, but to him it just compounded the overwhelming feeling of strangeness. Here he was, present at the end of a war that had meant so little to him but had swallowed the lives of so many other men the country over.

It had been two years since the Gathering. The seasons had passed by, felt as little more than incremental changes in temperature and length of daylight to him. Work and steady diet had rendered him tall
and strong, the body of a man his already though he was barely past sixteen. He had changed, and the truth was that sometimes the flesh felt no more his than the gauntlets or the cuirass he wore now.

It was not a new sensation. The War had welled and welled over the long months leading here, but Bennosuke had seen none of it. Kumagai and his men had been sent to hold a mountain pass, vital but well away from the fighting, and there they had stayed until they had received a summoning from Ukita a month ago to join this great host that had marched to Sekigahara.

Back then, before open conflict had erupted across the land, Kumagai had made no real effort to ascertain whether Bennosuke’s story was true. Miyamoto was a common-enough name that a search through the clan records would yield dozens of families, and rather than waste time sifting through them all he had simply permitted the boy to fall in with him and his men.

The samurai had had other preoccupations in any case. He was a horseman and a leader of cavalry, but in being sent to guard that pass so far away from grazing pastures they had had to surrender their steeds. Bennosuke was relieved to be spared the search for another horse, one less burden for him. For Kumagai, however, the idea of being holed up, of being stationary, seemed to make him uneasy.

“Our most noble lord is being wise and biding his time, holding what he has. I cannot fault the strategy,” the samurai had said again and again, and every time he did so Bennosuke could see the longing for a saddle in his eyes.

They had practically burst forth from the fort when the order had come a month ago; down from the hills into the troughs and the plains, and their eighty men had joined there with another eighty, and then they had met a band of five hundred, and then that too had been absorbed into a force of two thousand, and it grew and grew until the land swarmed. The samurai had marched and on either side of them rows of the lower born had knelt with their faces pressed into the dirt.

Ukita and the other great lords had chosen to meet in this valley simply to rally their individual forces into one colossal host and then plan the great offensive out upon the vast plains to the east. Sekigahara was wooded and they held the high ground, and entrenched within the forested slopes they had believed themselves safe and free
to spend however long they liked fawning over maps and proposed strategies.

It had been no small surprise, then, when yesterday the enemy had been sighted marching on them. Fearlessly they had come, heading straight into the cleared bowl of the valley just before night fell, endless blocks of men marching in formation from over the horizon. They had arranged themselves for battle in the darkness, their lanterns slowly engulfed by the coming of the fog, and the sheer number of those lights had been daunting. Bennosuke had heard uneasy conversations around him in the night, the men trying to convince themselves that it was a deception, that each warrior of the enemy was carrying two.

The boy had ignored them mostly. He had watched the lightening of the sky as he watched the hawk circling now—still, peaceful, apart. The bird swooped upward above the fog in a flowing arc, hanging at the peak for a single majestic instant. But it was a part of this imperfect world and had to obey its laws eventually; it turned upon itself and dived downward, vanishing into the mists below.

The Lord Ieyasu Tokugawa was a known falconer. Perhaps the hawk returned to his hand, somewhere hidden down there.

T
okugawa,” said the Lord Ukita, his hands steepled before his face, “Tokugawa, Tokugawa, Tokugawa.”

You’ve played this well
, he added ruefully within his head.

The lord’s palisade was below the mist line, a ring of thick silk open to the sky. The flickering of lanterns was unable to dispel the fog that painted the world the color of a sword. In this gloom Ukita sat on a stool, a hastily drawn map of the area spread before him on the floor, the heavy slashes of black ink glistening in the feeble light.

The valley was the shape of a stubby dog’s leg, and the map showed Ukita and his allies splayed out in a vague horseshoe on the three surrounding slopes of the “paw.” In the center of them, in the basin of the valley where the village of Sekigahara was—an insignificant mass of farmers’ hovels—the entirety of the enemy was dismissed
with a few diminutive characters. Thousands of unknown warriors in unknown formations there summated quite blithely as “Tokugawa.”

That lack of knowledge worried him deeply; logic could not be applied to the unknown. He chewed the inside of his lip, the motion very carefully hidden by his hands. Ukita did not want to show any sign of anxiety to the other lords and generals gathered there—from eager adolescents to the pensive ancients, all sitting, standing, pacing. He was the great lord, though, and they all waited for his command in silence. The noise of the thousands outside was smothered and distant.

How had it come to this?

It was a war for a title no one claimed to want: shogun. Each of the former Council of Elders vowed that their sole intention was to continue to humbly protect the child of the late Regent Toyotomi until he was of age to take power. Each of the former Council knew that the others were lying, of course, and of course each knew that they themselves were lying too. To be shogun was everything, all that their ancestors had planned for, and that the fortune was theirs to be born into a time where they had the opportunity to take it … Oh, it made the heart sing.

So tantalizingly close. As everyone had expected, it had been Tokugawa who was first ejected from the Council within months of the regent’s death for his “dangerous ambition” and “unusual deception.” As no one had expected, Tokugawa had flourished afterward. The Patient Tiger proved his name, winning allies to what should have been a hopeless cause, whispering in the right ears, promising land and gold that wasn’t his to some while lopping off the heads of others.

And the strategy had worked. Lords from the East and from the North flocked to his banner, pledging allegiance, his forces swelling until they matched the combined might of the four most powerful men in the country. It had been masterfully done, almost unbelievably so, and part of Ukita longed to join the man and share in such genius. But he had made his choices and sworn his oaths, and here they all were.

Tokugawa
. Those small characters, black on white. Ukita tasted blood.

L
ord Shinmen also had a map within his private palisade—and a message. He twisted the lacquer tube open and snatched the rolled paper from within. He read it, and then raised his eyes to his gathered bodyguard and adjutants.

“Our dear ally Lord Kobayakawa all but names our most noble Lord Ukita traitor,” he said, “and by extension ourselves also.”

“If Kobayakawa has communicated such with the other lords …” said one man, momentary concern in his eyes.

“He will have done so,” said Shinmen, and he waved at the mound of message tubes upon the floor to his side. “As has Ishida about him to me, and Konishi about Kikkawa … I would not be surprised to learn Tokugawa had turned the ground itself to his cause. I expect a quake at any moment.”

There was a nervous attempt at laughter from them all. It faltered not solely because it was a bad joke, but because all knew that there was the true worry. Why else would Tokugawa have the courage to march into this valley where he would be surrounded—unless he wasn’t surrounded at all? It stank of treachery, and frantic messages and accusations had been flitting back and forth between the lords all night.

If anyone was false Ukita would be the obvious suspect—he or the Lord Kobayakawa. Of all the lords there the two of them had the largest forces, each approaching twenty thousand men. They duly held the most vital positions in the line of battle too, Ukita the center and Kobayakawa the right, with the minor lords like Shinmen sworn to either of them filling in the gaps between.

Shinmen sucked air through his teeth, ran his fingers over the map. If Kobayakawa switched his loyalty, he could simply roll the mass of his men around and envelop the rest of the army within minutes. Shinmen looked at the layout of the forces, and he did not know which name worried him the most: Tokugawa or Kobayakawa.

Or Ukita
, the honest part of him added. The lord had neither shared nor shown any intention of betrayal in the preceding week—but you didn’t advertise conspiracy until the knife was in the back, did you?

He felt a rare powerlessness. Though he could command the life and death of hundreds, he was minor here; this was the fate of millions, of a nation. There was nothing to do but prepare. The lord stood with his legs wide and his arms outstretched and his men came to him with his armor. They bustled around him, cladding him in layers of leather and cloth and wood and iron, working with the speed of strong hands and practiced routine.

The young lad Kazuteru came to him last, bearing his helmet. The samurai placed it upon his head, and then tied the thick, soft cord across the lord’s chin. Shinmen looked at him, and suddenly he was reminded of what his own definition of loyalty had wrought. The familiar thought came to him that Kazuteru, who had struck the head, was some sort of vessel, and that part of
him
lingered on within the young man before Shinmen, watching.

“I’m sorry,” the lord murmured.

Kazuteru looked confused for an instant, and before he began the instinctive apology etiquette demanded when you did not understand a superior, a messenger clattered into the palisade:

“Orders from our most noble Lord Ukita, my lord!”

A
dvance!” bellowed the Marshal Fushimi. “The order is given, warriors of the West! The day has come! Glory to you all, your ancestors weep at the chance to partake in such a battle! The order to assembly is given! Make your way to your posts!”