Kill the Shogun (11 page)

The old man walked to the back of the crowd. Someone in the front was reading the notice board out loud for his illiterate brethren.

“… the aforementioned assassin is to be turned into the authorities immediately. Anyone found protecting this man will receive death, as will five of his neighbors. If you tell the authorities of where he is, so he may be captured, you will receive a thousand-ryo reward.” A gasp came from the crowd at the mention of the sum. “If you bring the authorities his head, you will receive a ten-thousand-ryo reward.” The reader had to stop, because instead of just gasping, the crowd went into a frenzied buzz of conversation that drowned out the reader’s voice.

Kaze, who was wearing a disguise he put together at the theater, patiently worked his way closer to the notice board. The clothes, white beard, hat, and hair allowed him to pass as an old man if he was not too closely scrutinized. He took the chance of having someone in the crowd inspect him at close quarters so he could read the notice board for himself.

His eyes swept across the
hiragana
letters on the board. Hiragana was used instead of kanji for notice boards. With hiragana, the words were written phonetically, and it was possible to sound out a word, even if you weren’t familiar with it. Although an expert could discern the various strokes that made up a particular kanji character, it was easier to read with hiragana.

They had both his former name and Matsuyama Kaze on the board, and they had a description of him. Fortunately, there were
thousands of samurai who could fit the description given. Kaze had not been certain about Nobu’s assertion that there was a ten-thousand-ryo price on his head, but there was the reward amount clearly written on the board, with Lord Yoshida’s name authorizing it. No wonder Boss Akinari had tried to kill him. Kaze wondered how firm Goro and Hanzo’s resolve to shelter him would remain, once they had both the reward and penalties listed on the board read to them.

Kaze turned and started walking out of the area, remembering to hobble and lean heavily on his stick.

The master is death.
It conquers the finest hands
and the keenest mind.

I
natomi.”

“What about Inatomi?” Ieyasu asked, fixing his eyes on Toyama.

Toyama was so anxious to parade his idea before Ieyasu, he had blurted it out at the first opportunity. Yoshida, Okubo, and Honda, who were also at the conference, looked at him peculiarly, because such an outburst was both unseemly for a samurai and a sign of lack of control.

Toyama licked his lips, then he cleared his throat. “You said yourself, Ieyasu-sama, that the distance for the assassination attempt was extremely long for a musket ball to carry, and that only a gun by Inatomi Gaiki could be used. Inatomi’s guns are rare and expensive, and he probably hasn’t made too many of them. This Matsuyama Kaze is a ronin, and could never afford a gun by Inatomi. He may be the assassin, but there may also be others in the plot. Inatomi lives nearby in Ueno. I think we should go to him and ask him who has bought his guns. It may not give us the exact plotters, but it will give us a list that we can examine. By
concentrating on Matsuyama Kaze, we may be allowing equally guilty parties to escape.”

“Ridiculous!” Honda exploded. Toyama actually flinched. “Knowing who has an Inatomi gun tells us nothing. I have one of his guns myself, and so does Ieyasu-sama.”

“No,” Ieyasu said quietly. “It’s actually a good idea. Our efforts to find this Matsuyama have so far failed.” Yoshida blushed. “It might be good to try another approach. Sometimes you’re too direct, Honda. It you’ve assaulted the front of the castle a dozen times with no success, walking through the back door is the best thing you can do.”

“It’s just a total waste of time,” Honda objected. “I’m still against it.”

Ieyasu ignored his blustery general. “Yoshida-san.”

“Yes, Ieyasu-sama!”

“Take a squad of men to the gun maker’s house. Toyama-san is right. I do think only a gun made by Inatomi could have been used in the assassination attempt. Get me a list of who Inatomi-sensei has sold his guns to. He takes such care with the manufacture of his weapons, I don’t imagine he’s made that many of them. If nothing else, the list will give us a basis for identifying lords who may be in conspiracy with this Matsuyama Kaze.”

“I’ll be happy to send my men,” Okubo offered.

“No, I want Yoshida-san to do this,” Ieyasu replied.

“Immediately, Ieyasu-sama!” Yoshida got to his feet and strode out of the room.

Honda glared at the retreating daimyo, while Toyama basked in the thought that his idea had been a good one.

T
wo hours later, Kaze trudged up a hill in Ueno, still disguised as an old man. After seeing the assassination site, he also had come to the conclusion that only a gun by Inatomi Gaiki could have
been used, and he wanted to talk to Inatomi. He stopped for a moment, leaning on his walking stick and getting his bearings.

He walked over to a roadside shop and asked directions to Inatomi-sensei’s house. Kaze used the title sensei, which meant teacher, to indicate that he knew that Inatomi was also a master.

Getting directions, he made his way down the road to the house of the well-to-do craftsman. He stopped at the door and entered. The house would be a sales outlet as well as a residence, so he had no compunction about entering. The entryway was a dirt square, surrounded by the house floor, which was a raised wooden platform. Here visitors were expected to stop, remove their sandals, and get properly greeted by servants or a member of the craftsman’s family.

He called out, “Sumimasen! Excuse me!”

Silence met his greeting. This was unusual. A craftsman’s house was always occupied, because it was also a place of business.

“Sumimasen!” Kaze shouted, thinking that perhaps he wasn’t heard the first time. Again, no response.

Kaze sat on the raised floor and removed his sandals. In the air he smelled smoke. It wasn’t the pleasant smell of a charcoal fire, but something more acrid and pungent. He decided to investigate. Fire was the great fear of all Japanese households. With paper and wood houses, this fear was not idle. Every Japanese city had periodic and disastrous fires, and in the pantheon of crimes, arson was considered the most heinous, next to treason.

As Kaze walked through the house, there was an unnatural silence to it. The house was a large one, one that would house a master, several apprentices, and a support staff of servants. In such a house there would always be a natural buzz of activity as people went about the business of daily life. This house was lifeless, and Kaze wondered where its inhabitants were, and why they had abandoned the house during the middle of the day, leaving a fire burning.

He walked from the entry into a sitting room, where Master Inatomi probably greeted important guests and conducted business. It was a spacious, twelve-mat room with a beautiful wooden rack along one wall. On the rack was a matchlock musket, made by Inatomi-sensei.

Kaze’s weapon was the sword, and he was an expert at judging a blade with a single glance. He was not as familiar with muskets, but even his relatively inexperienced eye could see that this weapon was also a work of art. The barrel was a sleek tube, with decorative engraving on its side. The matchlock mechanism was as finely made as a delicate porcelain sakè flask. A curved piece of steel held a rope fuse, which was lighted when the gun was to be fired. When the trigger was pulled, the lighted match was pushed into a hole and ignited the gunpowder in the barrel. The short wooden stock was beautifully grained and shaped, and polished to a high gloss. The weapon was an expert amalgam of deadly function and aesthetic craftsmanship.

Past the sitting room, Kaze entered a hallway. It went the length of the house to the back. It was there he found the first body.

It was a woman in her late thirties. She appeared to be a maid, dressed in a common gray kimono. She was lying on her face, one hand twisted behind her back, reaching for the terrible cut that stretched from her neck to her waist. Someone had cut her down as she ran. Kaze checked briefly to make sure she was dead, then continued walking down the hallway.

In a room that was an office, he found the source of the smoke. The room had sliding screens along two walls. These were shoved back, revealing shelves. If the room was used as a bedroom, the futons, pillows, and other sleeping gear would be kept on the shelves, ready to be brought out each night at bedtime. In this room, the shelves were used to store various papers, either folded or rolled into scrolls. Most of the papers were knocked off the shelves and spread on the floor. Kaze glanced at them, using his
walking stick to move them slightly so he could get a better look at them. They seemed to be a mixture of personal correspondence, business records, and diagrams of matchlock gun designs. In the center of the room was a copper box, filled with sand and used to burn charcoal in the winter. The smoke came from this box.

Kaze walked over and looked at the ashes left smoldering in the box. The fragile paper embers were still red. The flames from the paper burnt in the box had only recently died. Kaze surmised they were business records, perhaps listing who owned the guns made by Inatomi Gaiki. Obviously, someone else had realized that the choice of weapon would form a link that might lead to the assassins, and they had taken steps to break that chain.

He found another dead woman in the kitchen, but didn’t find the real carnage until he walked out of the back door of the house.

At the back of the house was a garden in the Chinese style. The carefully shaped azalea bushes were woven between serpentine paths of clean, white gravel. The yard was encircled by a high, bamboo fence. Against one wall of the fence were large rocks, chosen and artfully placed to give the illusion of a distant mountain range. It was a fine garden, perfectly in keeping with the artistic sensibilities Kaze saw in the craftsmanship of the musket.

The white gravel paths were stained red by the blood of bodies spread around the yard. Most of the bodies were on the main path, which led to a workshop at the back of the garden. The bodies of another woman and three men were sprawled across the path, each twisted in the pain of their death agony. Kaze paused to put on a pair of the wooden geta that were by the back door. These were raised wooden slippers, left conveniently for the use of people leaving the house, where they were in their tabi socks, and going out to the garden and workshop.

Kaze stopped for a moment to examine the cuts on the bodies. He could tell from the slashes that they were made by several men, not a single swordsman. He saw cuts made by at least three
different styles of swordsmanship. The men were good swordsmen but not experts. Against unarmed women, servants, and apprentices, it didn’t require much skill.

Kaze walked sadly to the workshop knowing what he would find.

The workshop had a large forge, filled with glowing charcoal, much like the forges used by swordsmiths. In the workshop were a variety of files and jigs that would not be used by swordsmiths; the particular tools of the gunsmith. Kaze glanced up at the corner of the workshop and saw a shrine to the God of the Forge. Then he looked down.

There were two other young men in the workshop, and a gray-haired older man: Inatomi and two apprentices. The face of Inatomi looked surprised, even in death. The slashing cut that half severed his neck must have come suddenly, perhaps from someone he knew. It was probably the signal to start the slaughter of the rest by samurai who stood outside the workshop, guarding the other members of the household in the garden. Two women had apparently managed to flee, one making it to the kitchen before she was cut down and the other almost making it outside the house before she was killed in the hall.

Nine people killed so a tenuous link to the attempted assassination of Ieyasu could be broken. Nine people, including a master who could craft beautiful objects like the musket that Kaze saw in the front room of the house. Life was fleeting. Kaze knew that. And all was an illusion. Kaze knew and believed that, too. But it seemed a colossal waste to snuff out the talent represented by Inatomi and his household.

If you were a dancer, a musician, or an actor, your skills died with you. Even if people talked about your skills after your death, this talk would be a mere shadow of the actual act. Even swordsmen fell into this category, Kaze reflected. Once you ceased to exist, your art ceased with you. If you were a poet, painter, or
artisan like Inatomi, some of your creations would exist after your death, but the real art was in the steady hands, the intelligence, the sense of balance and proportion, and the skill to create new poems, pictures, and beautiful objects. This creative ability died with the artist, and even if the work of the artist lived on, this work was now circumscribed by a finite body of work. Nothing new would ever be created by this particular artist, to surprise, delight, and enlighten new audiences.

Kaze sighed. He decided to do something out of respect for the skill of Inatomi-sensei that he usually only did to propitiate the souls of people he had slain. He looked about the workshop and found a piece of fine chestnut wood. Perhaps Inatomi-sensei was going to use it for a musket stock. On a workbench, Kaze found a knife and, amid the carnage and bodies around him, he sat in the doorway of the workshop and started to carve the wood.

Y
oshida rode up to Inatomi’s house, leading ten mounted samurai. As he reached the front of the house, one of the samurai leapt off his horse and rushed forward to hold the reins of Yoshida’s stallion.

“Captain!” Yoshida said.

A samurai rode forward. “Yes, Yoshida-sama?”

“Go in and tell Inatomi-sensei that I have arrived. Tell him it is on business from the Shogun himself!”

“Yes, my Lord!” The captain rushed into the house, but returned a few minutes later, puzzled.

“There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the house, my Lord.”

“Ridiculous! Even if Inatomi-sensei is out, his servants or apprentices will be here.”

“I called several times, but no one came to the door to greet me.”

“Did you look in the house?”

“No, Yoshida-sama, I thought—”

“Idiot! We’re here on the Shogun’s business! Take some men and search the house. Find out why there’s no one to greet us.”

Chagrined, the captain motioned to three samurai to dismount and follow him. They entered the house, pausing to remove their sandals at the doorway out of habit and respect. In moments they found the dead maid.

All the samurai took out their swords. “Follow me,” the captain ordered. They quietly made their way through the house, pausing at the office and the kitchen with the second body, and into the back garden. The captain sucked in his breath at the sight of so many bodies in the garden. In the doorway of the workshop at the end of the garden, a flash of movement caught his eye. He signaled his men to follow him, and they didn’t bother to stop to put on the geta. They made their way across the garden, their feet, clad in only tabi socks, muffling their footsteps. They carefully approached the workshop door.

As they reached the doorway, the captain was able to see more bodies in the workshop. He also saw a living person doing something peculiar.

There was what seemed to be an old man placing a wooden statue on a workbench. The figure wore an old but respectable kimono and a farmer’s woven straw hat. Wisps of gray hair peeked out from the edge of the hat and partially obscured the face of the figure, but the man’s muscular arms didn’t look like the wasted limbs of an ojiisan. The captain looked at the statue and was surprised to see it was a Kannon, a statue of the Goddess of Mercy, carved from chestnut wood. The serene face of the Goddess looked out at the carnage in the workshop and garden, providing some grace to the souls of the slaughtered.

“Oi! You!” the captain said. “Stay where you are. I want to talk to you about what happened here.”

Without showing the slightest surprise at the captain’s shout, the old man smoothly placed the Kannon on the shelf and reached forward for a shovel that was sitting next to the forge. He scooped out a shovelful of the forge’s contents and tossed it out the door of the workshop.