Cloud of Sparrows (34 page)

“He wants us to think he’s taken the rest of the men elsewhere.”

“He hasn’t?”

“Not very far. If you wanted to pass the barrier without a fight, what would you do?”

“I saw a narrow path along the hillside. It begins out of sight of the barricade. I’d go that way at night.” He thought for a moment. “We’d have to leave the horses. It’s strictly a footpath.”

“That is what he wants us to do,” Heiko said. “He has men hidden in the trees along that path. Even if we get past them, we will be on foot. He will catch us long before we are safe.”

Stark recalled what he’d seen. He hadn’t noticed any sign of anyone hiding, but of course, he wouldn’t, not if they were any good at it. “What will we do?”

“I have watched you ride. You are a good horseman.”

“Thank you. So are you.”

Heiko acknowledged his praise with a bow. She indicated his gun. “How good are you with that?”

“Good.” This was no time for false modesty. She wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t need to know.

“Are you accurate while riding?”

“Not as accurate as I am standing still.” Stark couldn’t keep the grin off his face. This delicate little woman planned to charge the barricade.

“No sleeping,” the barricade commander said. “If they try to pass, they’ll try at night.”

“Nobody’s going to come this way,” one of the samurai said. “They’ll see the barrier and take the other trail, as Sohaku said they would.”

“If they see you sleeping, they might change their minds. Now get up and pay attention.” The commander glared at the next man. “Did you hear me? Wake up.” He slapped the man’s head. The man toppled over, lifeless. The commander looked at his hand. It was wet with blood.

“Eeeee!” Another man in front of the barrier fell, clutching at the razor-edged throwing star lodged in his throat.

“We’re under attack!” the commander yelled. He looked in every direction. They were under attack, but from where and by whom?

Something came rolling down the hill. The commander raised his musket to fire. The body landed at his feet. It was another of his men, with his throat neatly cut from ear to ear.

“Ninjas!” someone screamed.

Fool! That would only spread panic. When this was done, he would punish whoever had called out. He couldn’t immediately place the voice. Which one of the men sounded so girlish?

He turned to give orders and saw someone small standing right in front of him, face cloaked. Only the eyes were visible. They were very beautiful eyes. The commander felt a wetness spreading across his chest. He opened his mouth to speak, but he no longer had a voice. As he fell, he heard gunfire. It didn’t sound like muskets. His head against the ground, he heard the hooves of galloping horses. A moment later, two horses leaped over the barrier in front of him. The rider of the first horse was firing a large handgun. There was no one in the saddle of the second horse. Good. At least they had gotten one of them.

Before he could speculate as to which one, blood stopped flowing to his brain.

Stark waited by the stream. It was exactly where Heiko said it would be. When Stark rode at the barrier with Heiko’s horse in tow, he expected to run into heavy musket fire. Sohaku’s men were firing, but not in his direction. When he jumped the barrier he saw several bodies already down. He hadn’t shot them.

Heiko came silently out of trees. How had she gotten there so fast?

“Are you well?” she asked.

“Yes, fine. You?”

“A musket ball grazed my arm.” She knelt by the stream, washed the wound, and deftly tied a bandage over it. “It is not serious.”

Heiko’s horse neighed. There was a gurgle in it that didn’t sound right. It neighed again, more weakly this time, and fell over on its side.

Stark and Heiko knelt beside the fallen animal. It was still breathing. Soon it wouldn’t be. A bullet had torn through its neck. The snow was dark with blood.

“Your prize horse is strong,” Heiko said. “It will carry us both until we can find another.”

She climbed on behind him. She was so light, he was sure his horse wouldn’t even notice her.

Who killed more men back there, Heiko or him?

Stark wondered if every geisha was so multitalented.

Sohaku rushed back to the barrier with his main force as soon as he heard the first gunshot. He found eighteen of the thirty men he’d left there dead or seriously wounded.

“We were attacked by ninjas,” one of the survivors said. “They came at us from every direction.”

“How many were there?”

“We never saw them clearly. That’s how it always is with ninjas.”

“Was Lord Genji with them?”

“I didn’t see him. But he may have been among the horsemen who jumped the barrier. They passed very quickly, firing their guns as they rode through us.”

“Guns?” Hidé and Shigeru had each taken a musket when they rode out of Edo with Genji. The presence of guns probably meant that Genji had been with them. If they had split into two or three groups, which was what Sohaku would have advised had he been with them, the guns would have gone with the lord. “Did you count them?”

“Yes, Reverend Abbot. There were at least five, perhaps ten.”

Sohaku frowned. Five or ten guns. Plus an undetermined number of ninjas. That meant Genji had been reinforced somehow. By whom? And from where? Was it possible that his allies were already rising up to support him?

“Send a messenger to Kudo. Tell him to rejoin us.”

“Yes, Reverend Abbot. Should the messenger go immediately?”

The hesitancy he heard angered Sohaku. Were his men so weak a single encounter had broken their spirits?

“If not now, when?”

“Forgive me for making a suggestion unasked, sir, but might it not be prudent to wait until morning?”

Sohaku looked down the trail. The dim light of the new moon was just bright enough to make a man imagine shadows within shadows. Such imaginings created vulnerabilities ninjas would not fail to exploit. Some of them were with Genji. Wouldn’t some also lurk behind precisely to prevent what Sohaku now intended?

His anger faded. “Do so in the morning, then.”

“Yes, Reverend Abbot.”

But when dawn came, a messenger arrived before his departed.

Kawakami waited for Genji to come down from the mountains to the Inland Sea. He wondered idly whether Kudo had managed to shoot Shigeru. It was of no real importance. If he still lived, he wouldn’t for much longer. Among Kawakami’s two thousand men was a battalion of five hundred musketeers. No swordsman could stand against five hundred guns, not even Shigeru.

Genji’s fate would be worse. Whatever protections he enjoyed as a Great Lord he had forfeited by leaving Edo without the Shogun’s express permission. Such a flagrant violation of the Alternate Residency Law automatically raised the assumption that he was in rebellion. The Shogun did not suffer traitors lightly. Arrest, trial, and condemnation lay ahead. Many questions would be asked. Many secrets would be revealed. Everyone would see then who knew and who didn’t. Before Genji was ordered to commit ritual suicide, he would be humiliated and disgraced, destroyed in a trap Kawakami had been crafting for nearly two decades. He hadn’t known then Genji would be his victim. The grandfather, Kiyori, had been Great Lord of Akaoka at the time, and Genji’s wastrel sire, Yorimasa, was next in line. He was the one Kawakami had been thinking of when his brilliant plan came to him as if in a vision. Such was the depth of his own foresight that the one was as appropriate as the other. He couldn’t help feeling deep satisfaction at his own wisdom, and why shouldn’t he?

“Lord, a courier from the Shogun has arrived.”

“Show him in. Wait. Have we had any word from Mukai?”

“No, my lord. He seems to have left Edo. No one knows where he has gone, or why.”

This was the most disturbing news Kawakami had heard in a long time. Mukai was not particularly important. But he was always so dully predictable, so stolid, so very much just there. That was his chief, perhaps his only real, virtue. For him to act so out of character was unsettling, especially in this time of crisis. Kawakami would make his displeasure abundantly clear when he next saw his assistant.

“Lord Kawakami.” The courier went to one knee and bowed in the manner appropriate to a samurai in the field. “Lord Yoshinobu sends his greetings.”

Yoshinobu was the head of the Shogun’s Council. Kawakami took the letter from the courier and opened it hurriedly. Perhaps the situation in the capital was so critical that the Council had decided to take more drastic action against Genji. This could be an order abolishing the Okumichi clan without delay. If so, the Shogun’s forces would immediately beseige Akaoka Domain’s famous fortress, Cloud of Sparrows Castle. Since Kawakami’s troops were already halfway there, he would be the one executing the order.

But it was not to be.

Kawakami’s disappointment was so great, his chest actually hurt. The Council had retroactively approved the withdrawal of the lords and their families from Edo. In addition, the Alternate Residency Law was temporarily suspended until further notice. Genji was no longer a traitor. He was a loyal lord obeying the Shogun’s commands.

“Is the Shogun also withdrawing from Edo?”

“No, my lord.” The courier handed Kawakami another letter.

The Shogun’s Council ordered all Allied Lords to ready their armies for deployment in the Kanto and Kansai plains should it become necessary to resist an outsider invasion directed toward the Imperial Capital of Kyoto or the Shogun’s Capital of Edo. The Shogun would lead the forces in the Kanto from Edo Castle. According to Yoshinobu, one hundred thousand samurai would soon be ready to fight the invaders to the death.

Kawakami was tempted to laugh out loud. A hundred thousand samurai with swords, a few outdated muskets, and even fewer and more outdated cannons would soon be a hundred thousand corpses in the event of an outsider invasion.

“A squadron of warships bombarded Edo with great effect,” Kawakami said, “and at no loss to themselves. What if the outsiders just keep doing more of the same?”

“They cannot conquer Japan with warships alone,” the courier said. “Eventually, they will have to come ashore. When they do, we will behead them as our ancestors beheaded Kublai Khan’s Mongols.”

The courier was one of many such samurai, obsessed with the sword and living in the past. The outsiders had siege mortars that could fling explosive shells the size of men five miles. They had horse-drawn cannons that could be moved swiftly from place to place, cutting down thousands here, then thousands many miles elsewhere, in the space of a few hours, and the outsiders had many of those cannons. They had rifles and handguns that used self-contained cartridges instead of separate powder and ball. And most important of all, they had been killing each other with the predecessors of these deadly weapons during the two and a half centuries Japan’s samurai had slumbered in the Tokugawa peace.

Kawakami said, “We will meet their war machines with our swords and our fighting spirit, and we will show them what we are made of.” Flesh. Bone. Blood.

“Yes, Lord Kawakami,” the courier said, his chest swelling with pride, “we will.”

Hidé prepared his ambush well. He found a dozen places suitable for his purposes in the hills surrounding the crossroads. He had both his and Shigeru’s muskets. He would fire them from one position, then run to the next and shoot arrows. When he reached the next, he would reload and fire the muskets again. This wouldn’t fool Sohaku or Kudo, but they couldn’t be sure, and that uncertainty would slow them down.

So far, no one had come. Three nights ago, he thought he heard an outburst of shooting from the windward direction. Lady Heiko and Stark had gone that way. He had a feeling they’d successfully escaped from whoever had been shooting at them. His confidence in Stark was very high ever since the iaido tournament. Lady Heiko was in good hands.

He was less sure about Lord Genji. His foreknowledge of future events should keep him safe. Yet, as the lord himself said, prophecies were not always easy to understand. He would have been much more at ease if Stark had accompanied the lord.

Hidé stopped thinking about prophecies and focused his attention completely on what he could see and hear. Someone was approaching from behind him. Was he so dull that the enemy had managed to circle around without alerting him? He raised his musket and prepared to fire. It was a lone man. He was leading rather than riding his horse, which pulled a makeshift sled behind it. There were two bundles on the sled. They appeared to be bodies wrapped in blankets.

Hidé lowered the musket. It was Shigeru.

Fear chilled him more than the winter day.

Whose bodies were on the sled?