Shinju (35 page)

An idea came to him. With these three men out chasing him, the house was less heavily guarded. And they would expect him to run away from it, not toward it. He could pass under the buildings and head for the wall on the far side of the gate.

Sano began a slow advance on the house. He felt each step of the way with his hands and feet so he wouldn't make any noise. Finally he reached the edge of the clearing. Lying there, he scanned the house.

The front-door guard remained at his post, gazing after his companions. Another guard was patrolling the side of the villa. Sano watched the man complete two rounds of inspection to learn the pattern. Walk to front of house, pause, look around. Turn. Walk along side of house, all the way past covered corridor to pavilion, while scrutinizing woods. Turn, repeat. Sano waited
until the guard had almost reached the turnaround point at the pavilion. Then he hurried across the open space in a crouching run and dived under the house.

He traversed the side house and its covered corridor. He'd reached the
shinden
when he heard muffled voices and creaking wood overhead. Lord Niu and his guests. Crawling to the
shinden
's rear corner, Sano poked his head out from under the house. He saw no one on the back veranda or in the garden. Those guards must be the ones now searching the woods for him. He eased the rest of his body free. The voices grew louder, carrying through the flimsy paper panes between the lattice bars. The men sounded agitated, all talking at once, their words unintelligible. Tense in anticipation of more flying arrows, Sano knew he should go before the guards came. He reminded himself that he had the sandal and the rope and O-hisa's testimony. What more could he expect?

Instead of running, Sano drew his dagger. He'd come too far and risked too much to leave without learning all he could. Emboldened by the noise in the house, he cut a hole in the window. Cautiously he put his eye to it.

Oil lamps and charcoal braziers filled the vast room with an eerie, flickering light and a smoky haze. In the center, twenty young men sat in a semicircle, arguing, oblivious to anything outside. Sano recognized some of them as men Lord Niu had met at the swordmaker's shop and the martial arts academy. So Lord Niu's movements hadn't been as aimless as they'd seemed. He'd arranged the “chance” encounters to summon the men to this meeting. Now they faced him as he knelt upon a platform, a painted screen at his back. An uneasy quiet, punctuated by throat clearings, fell over the group, as if they feared his response.

Although the remains of a meal lay on trays scattered among the men, Sano found the scene more suggestive of a haphazard picnic than of a banquet. Their serious expressions and the almost palpable tension in the room told him this was no ordinary social occasion. Also, the men were armed, as they normally wouldn't
be in a private house. Sano pursed his lips in surprise when he recognized the crests on their kimonos: those of the Maeda, Date, and Hosokawa families among them. Lord Niu had assembled representatives from every major daimyo clan except for the Tokugawas.

The Maeda man spoke. “I think the plan is too risky,” he said. “It won't work. I propose we reconsider the alternatives.”

Immediately the others joined their voices again in furious dissent.

“He's right!” “No! It will work!” “There's no time to lose, we have to act!” “I don't like it, either.”

“That's enough.” Lord Niu, who had watched with a thin smile as his companions argued, now silenced them with one peremptory command.

They turned to him, faces reflecting various degrees of fear, respect, and admiration. Sano could understand how Lord Niu inspired such emotions. The daimyo's son fairly shimmered with a passion that lit his eyes and made his small body seem larger. Even his skin, flushed perhaps by his recent sexual release, suggested an inner fire that drew the men to its warmth. For what scheme had he recruited them? Sano wondered whether it had any bearing on the murders, or if he was risking his life needlessly by eavesdropping.

“There will be no more discussion of the plan,” Lord Niu said, disappointing Sano. He stood, a slight jerkiness of movement the only sign of his deformity. “But in case you have forgotten, let me remind you why our action is necessary, and what we stand to gain from it.”

His voice rose in both pitch and volume; he dominated the room, holding the other men motionless as he paced the platform. “Are we not sick unto death of the repression and humiliation that our oppressors have perpetrated upon us? Have our fathers and grandfathers not been stripped of their ancestral fiefs and moved to lesser ones at the ends of the earth? Have they not suffered the
indignities of alternate attendance in Edo and imprisonment on their estates? Are they not unable to come and go freely?”

An angry rumble passed through the men. Backs straightened; fists clenched.

“Must we continue to let the Tokugawas drain our wealth away by forcing us to subsidize the maintenance of their castles, their roads, their waterworks?” Lord Niu shouted, eyes blazing. “Why should we finance the government while the shogun wastes his own money on his harem of boy actors and peasants? Why should we let him dictate how we should furnish our homes, and even how we should dress? Should we endure his spying upon us? Or the abominable harassment by his inspectors when we travel on the Tōkaido?”

The rumble became a roar. “We won't stand for it any longer!” someone shouted. Other men took up the cry, quieting only when Lord Niu raised his voice over theirs.

“Tokugawa Tsunayoshi is a weak fool who lets his army and his chamberlain, the despicable Yanagisawa, run the government while he sports with the wives and daughters of his ministers. And with his enforced peace, he would drag us down to his own level of moral depravity. Do we let him deprive us of our rightful occupation—that of serving our honor by making war?”

“No! No! Down with the Tokugawas!”

Sano had to choke back a gasp of surprise. He found himself trembling with excitement. The meeting's isolated setting, the secretive arrival of the participants, and Lord Niu's incendiary speech could mean only one thing. The risky plan constituted a plot against the Tokugawa government. Treason. For which Lord Niu, if caught, would be executed and disgraced more certainly than if convicted for the murder of a samurai child. And for which his family would share his punishment. Now Sano wondered whether Yukiko had died not because she'd witnessed the murder, but because she'd discovered the plot. And what about Noriyoshi? Had he learned of it too?

“Do we let Tsunayoshi rob us of our samurai heritage and values as well, by turning us into simpering bureaucrats who protect dogs, or vulgar oafs who brawl in the streets for want of anything better to do?” Lord Niu asked.

“No!” all twenty voices shouted in unison.

“Then we must act without delay. We must fight as we were born to do. We will restore to our names the honor and glory that has been denied them for too long!”

Now that he'd recovered from his initial shock, Sano sensed an underlying false note in Lord Niu's performance. His pacing, his hand gestures, and the anger in his voice and expression seemed overly theatrical. Lord Niu was playing to his audience as an actor would, exploiting their legitimate anger toward the Tokugawas. Did he really care about the shogun's mistreatment of his or the other daimyo clans?

But the men responded with great enthusiasm to his theatrics. “Yes! Yes!” The floor shuddered as they leaped to their feet. Metal rasped as they unsheathed their swords and held them high.

Lord Niu reached behind the painted screen. He held two objects high: an open scroll half covered with characters, and a writing brush. “Then it is time to pledge our oath,” he announced.

Kneeling, he laid the scroll and brush on the platform. He drew his dagger. A hush fell over the room as he gashed his palm. Dipping the brush into his blood, he wrote the characters of his name on the scroll below the text. His face betrayed no sign of the pain he must have felt, but some of the other young men winced. One by one, they mounted the platform, cut their palms, added their signatures to the scroll, and returned to their places.

Sano's own palms tingled as he watched. These men, although foolhardy, were serious. A blood oath was a solemn one. He would have given anything to know what the text on the scroll said.

When they finished, Lord Niu stood. “A poem to commemorate
this occasion,” he announced, a sly smile lifting the corner of his mouth. Gesturing with the rolled scroll, he recited:

The poem was not familiar to Sano, nor did it seem a very good one. And its significance escaped him. But the conspirators greeted it with wild cheers and laughter that broke the tension which had accompanied their oath. Then Lord Niu began shouting more epithets against the Tokugawas, inciting his men to greater fury. The house thundered with their shouts.

“Soon we will show our fathers that we are true samurai!” Lord Niu cried. “We will make them proud to call us their sons!”

For the first time, Sano heard real passion behind Lord Niu's words. Now he understood that while the other young men sought power and glory for their generation, Lord Niu was doing this for his father. The knowledge gave Sano an unexpected and unwilling sense of identification with Lord Niu. Filial duty compelled them both. Except in Lord Niu, some warped form of love drove him to expose the daimyo to the dubious benefits and certain dangers of having a traitor in the family. But Sano began to despair of learning the details of the plot. Even if he didn't need them to complete his case against Lord Niu, duty required that he report them to the authorities. He looked over his shoulder for the guards. How long could he stay without getting caught?

A sudden drop in the noise level inside recalled his attention to the window. He brought his eye to the hole again. He saw the men turn toward a guard who had entered the room.

Lord Niu said, “What is it?” Breathless from his efforts, he wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

The guard bowed. “I am sorry to interrupt you, master, but I must warn you that there is a trespasser on the grounds. We almost caught him in the west woods, but he got away.”

First Sano froze. Then he felt an instinctive desire to flee. Only his compelling need to hear more kept him where he was.

“A spy!” a Hosokawa man gasped.

The others let loose a volley of panicky questions and laments. “Oh, no! Are we discovered? Who betrayed us? What will we do now?” They seemed so young, so excitable, and so easily frightened that Sano wondered how they would manage to carry out whatever plan they'd concocted.

Lord Niu strode to the front of his platform. He alone showed no fear. “Fools!” he said with a sardonic laugh. “Why do you waste time talking and worrying? Go out and kill him, and he won't trouble us any longer.”

“He's right! Come on!” Swords drawn, the men stampeded from the room.

“And don't just look in the west woods—search the whole estate,” Lord Niu called after them. He remained on his platform, arms folded, face stern and immobile.

Sano didn't wait for the bloodthirsty horde to spill out of the
shinden
. Turning, he ran into the woods, making straight for the wall. He scaled it and jumped into the darkness and safety that lay outside.

T
he swordmaker, dressed like a Shinto priest in white ceremonial robes, pulled a glowing bar of red-hot steel from the outdoor furnace with his tongs. His assistant grabbed the other end, bending the pliant metal double. Then, chanting prayers, the two men began to beat the bar with heavy mallets, the first step in the process of folding and refolding the steel into a million layers that would give the finished blade flexibility as well as strength. Each blow rang sharply in the clear morning air. Apprentices dashed about, fetching water for the final quenching, stoking the furnace with coal. Heat poured from the furnace into the lane that separated the swordmaker's shop from a row of foundries where craftsmen shaped metal into horseshoes and other more mundane forms.

Sano leaned against the low wooden fence, alternately watching the swordmakers and scanning the lane. Laborers pushed past him, carrying raw materials and finished wares to and from the workshops. Whenever a woman approached, he straightened in anticipation, then leaned back again when he saw it was not O-hisa. But he wasn't worried. He'd arrived a little ahead of the appointed hour, and besides, a short wait couldn't spoil his mood.

Lord Niu's men hadn't caught him last night. A hot bath and a few hours of sleep at an inn had eased the effects of the long walk back to Edo and an equally long stay at a disreputable teahouse on
the edge of town, where he'd waited for dawn and the opening of the gates. In clothes dried over the brazier, and with both swords at his waist, Sano felt confident that he could meet the day's challenges with success. The crisp, bright weather reflected his renewed optimism. Only the constant worry over his father gnawed at the edges of his thoughts. Patience, he counseled himself. He had Noriyoshi's sandal and the rope tucked in his cloak, ready to bring to the Council of Elders. And soon he would have O-hisa, his witness.