The Iris Fan (39 page)

Startled out of his fear, Lord Ienobu said, “You knew? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Lady Nobuko leaned over and snarled in his face. “Why didn’t you tell me you were responsible for Tsuruhime dying of smallpox?”

Lord Ienobu recoiled. “I’m not! You’ve never believed it.”

“You are! I’ve believed it ever since Reiko told me.”

Astonishment struck Reiko. “But you said you didn’t.”

Lady Nobuko said with sly triumph, “I fooled you, didn’t I?” To Lord Ienobu she said, “I fooled you, too. All these years I’ve rubbed my nose on your behind, you thought I was your friend. But I was just pretending. And now I have you right where I want you.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Lord Ienobu asked.

“My mind is set on the fact that you killed Tsuruhime.” Grief coarsened Lady Nobuko’s voice. “One reason I stabbed the shogun is that Yoshisato was coming back. The other is revenge on you.”

Lord Ienobu bleated, “You’re insane.”

“I could have killed the shogun when I stabbed him, but I didn’t. Do you want to know why?” Lady Nobuko shook Lord Ienobu. He whimpered. “I only hurt him enough to injure him seriously. I wanted him to linger while you gloated because soon you would be shogun. So that when you thought your dream was within your grasp, I could kill you. Just like this.” She pricked Ienobu’s throat with the blade. He recoiled violently. “As you die you’ll see your dream slip away. That is your punishment for murdering Tsuruhime.”

*   *   *

“GET DOWN!” MARUME
flung his arms across Sano’s and Masahiro’s backs as they entered the castle, shielding them with his armored shoulder flaps and chain-mail sleeves. They crouched, heads ducked, as they climbed uphill through the battle. In front of them, troops shielded Yoshisato and Yanagisawa. This was the purest expression of Bushido—samurai putting their own bodies between their masters and danger. Sano remembered Hirata stepping forward to take a blade for him. Stray bullets struck walls. Fragments spattered Sano. He felt Marume take the punch of a bullet. Marume staggered but kept moving. The combat around them was mostly hand-to-hand, a riot of bashing and grappling. There was little room to swing a sword. Masahiro shoved aside a bleeding, unconscious soldier whose body was held upright by the packed crowd. Sano raised his head long enough to see the open gate of the first checkpoint. Through the rain and the gunpowder haze he smelled scorched oil.

“Look out!” he called.

A flood of thick, crackling, smoking liquid poured from the window of the guardhouse above the checkpoint. Fighters packed into the small, high-walled enclosure screamed as the boiling oil seeped into their armor, burnt their flesh. Trying to escape the checkpoint, they slipped on the oil and fell. Writhing bodies slid downhill toward Sano. He and his comrades hurried through the checkpoint before the guards could dump more oil. The passage beyond contained another battle. Sano now knew what the journey to hell was like—an endless slog through a narrow channel that smelled of blood and gunpowder, crowded with men trying to kill one another, where arrows and bullets barraged him, paved with corpses.

Marume was breathing hard; he leaned on Sano. Alarmed, Sano said, “Are you injured?”

“I’m all right. Don’t stop!”

Higher up the hill, the shooting continued; more hot oil deluged the checkpoints. The army ranks thickened as Sano neared the uppermost tier of the castle. The passage leading to the gate to the palace was deep in the corpses, awash in blood. Less than half of Yanagisawa’s advance troops were still fighting. Some shot at the guards who fired down at them. Others charged through the gate, ahead of Yoshisato and his gangsters, Yanagisawa, and his bodyguards. As Sano followed with Marume and Masahiro, he glanced backward. Only a few men from his squadron hurried after him. The others had been killed.

The battle raging in the palace grounds engulfed Sano. Lord Ienobu’s forces vastly outnumbered the invaders. A line of them ringed the palace, swords drawn. Gangs of soldiers attacked each of Yanagisawa’s. Gunners in the nearest tower fired into the melee.

“The Large Interior!” Sano shouted, beckoning Marume and Masahiro.

Yanagisawa caught his arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“To rescue my wife and daughter.”

“Oh, no, you’re not. You’re coming with us!” Yanagisawa and his bodyguards surrounded Sano and Masahiro.

“I’ll get them,” Marume said, panting and sweating. “You go kill Lord Ienobu.”

As he and his son were rushed toward the palace, Sano looked backward and saw Marume fall. The big detective struggled to get up, then lay still while men fought around him. Sano cried, “Marume!”

His good, loyal old friend was dead in the line of duty. Reiko and Akiko were alone at the mercy of fate. The soldiers guarding the palace attacked his regiment. They peeled troops away from Sano, Masahiro, Yanagisawa, and Yoshisato, like a tornado stripping leaves off a tree. The four of them, the gangsters, Yanagisawa’s bodyguards, and a handful of troops made it through the palace door. Soldiers chased them down the wide corridor, along the polished cypress floor, past the mural of pine trees painted on the walls. Their troops stopped to fight the defenders. Sano, Yanagisawa, Masahiro, and Yoshisato charged ahead.

The inner passages and rooms were empty. In the sudden quiet, Sano and his comrades trod softly, swords still drawn. They met no one, but Sano’s skin prickled underneath layers of armor, clothes, and sweat. He sensed Lord Ienobu at the heart of the palace, like a monstrous spider in a web. Surely Lord Ienobu must feel the web shaking as his enemies drew near. The door to the shogun’s chambers was open, unguarded. Sano smelled incense and the fetid sickroom odor. He heard unintelligible voices raised in anger and fear. As he stealthily advanced, the garble resolved into words.

“Just let me go!” said Lord Ienobu, tearful, pleading. “I’ll give you whatever you want!”

“There’s nothing you can give me.” The voice was familiar yet so distorted by rage, scorn, and gloating that Sano couldn’t place it. “All I want is this.”

Sano exchanged baffled glances with Masahiro. Yanagisawa and his bodyguards stormed the chamber, Yoshisato and the gangsters close on their heels. They all stopped so suddenly that Sano and Masahiro bumped into them. Sano saw what had halted them in their tracks.

38

LORD IENOBU LAY
on the floor with his head in Lady Nobuko’s lap. She held a knife to his throat. The shogun was a withered effigy of himself, unconscious. Sano barely noticed the physician or the guards, he was so happy to see Reiko and Akiko. His eyes filled with tears that dissolved his anger at his wife. She and Akiko were alive. It was all that mattered.

“Papa!” Akiko cried. “Masahiro!”

Reiko’s expression wavered between relief and uncertainty. Sano saw that she didn’t trust him to do right by her and Akiko. She looked to Masahiro, as if he were her best hope of rescue. It was like a knife puncturing Sano’s happiness.

Lady Nobuko’s face fell. Lord Ienobu rolled his eyes toward the door, saw Yanagisawa, and screamed to the guards, “They’re here to murder the shogun! Stop them!”

The guards jumped to their feet, drawing their swords. They wore armor but had removed their helmets because the room was so warm. Masahiro drew his bow, stepped forward, and let fly. The arrow pierced one guard through the eye. He fell dead. The other guard swung at Sano. Despite his heavy armor, Sano moved with a swiftness born of his need to protect his wife and daughter and his wish to prove to Reiko that he could. He furiously hacked at the guard. The guard went down, bleeding from so many wounds that Sano couldn’t say which had killed him. Yoshisato’s gangsters deployed their spears against the other guards, who looked like they were trying to fend off bolts of lightning. In an instant they, too, were dead.

Sano, breathing hard from exertion, didn’t have time to ask why Lady Nobuko was holding a knife to Lord Ienobu. Akiko ran to him. He didn’t have time to ask what she and Reiko were doing in the shogun’s bedchamber. Akiko said, “Papa, we found out she stabbed the shogun!” and pointed at Lady Nobuko. “She wore the other lady’s peppermint hair oil!”

Yanagisawa pointed at Lord Ienobu and shouted to Lady Nobuko, “Kill him!”

Lady Nobuko stared at the man who was ordering her to do his dirty work. Anger flashed in her good eye. “You.” She said the word like a curse.

“If you kill me, Yoshisato will become shogun,” Lord Ienobu hurried to say. “He and Yanagisawa will rule over everybody including you. So you’d better let me live.”

Lady Nobuko slackened her grip on the knife. Yanagisawa said quickly, “He killed your stepdaughter. He deserves to die.”

Lord Ienobu pointed at Yanagisawa and said, “He had you kidnapped and raped!”

“You got over it,” Yanagisawa told Lady Nobuko. “Tsuruhime won’t get over dying of smallpox. His sin against you is worse than mine.”

Lady Nobuko’s distorted face took on a hunted expression as she looked from Yanagisawa to Ienobu, torn between two equally strong hatreds. Lord Ienobu pleaded, “Let me go, and I’ll make it up to you.”

“How’s he going to do that—bring Tsuruhime back from the dead?” Yanagisawa scoffed.

Reiko, Akiko, and Masahiro looked to Sano: They expected him to resolve the standoff, but he didn’t know what to say. To side with Yanagisawa or Lord Ienobu—a choice from hell.

“Be quiet!” Lady Nobuko cried. “You’re confusing me!”

Sano deduced that she’d stabbed the shogun in an effort to block Yanagisawa’s path to power. To block it again she must spare Lord Ienobu. Her dilemma was the same as Sano’s—she didn’t want either Ienobu or Yanagisawa to win. She must have known that by taking action against one she benefited the other; she wasn’t stupid. But her thirst for vengeance, and perhaps her old age, had demented her. She was making decisions as she went along, and she hadn’t come up hard against her dilemma until now.

“I’ll set you straight,” Yanagisawa said. “This is your last chance to get revenge on Lord Ienobu. If you don’t kill him, we will.”

He and Yoshisato raised their swords. They and the gangsters surrounded Lady Nobuko. The gangsters pointed their spears down at Lord Ienobu. Sano and Masahiro joined the circle. Masahiro drew his bow, aiming at Lord Ienobu’s face. Sano motioned Reiko to take Akiko outside—the killing that his daughter had already seen was bad enough—but they stayed. Beautiful and fierce, they’d never looked so much alike.

Lord Ienobu’s eyes glittered with fear and the reflections of steel blades. Lady Nobuko said, “Not yet! Let me think!”

Again that sense of wrongness troubled Sano. Wars were supposed to be won on the battlefield, with each leader having a chance of taking the head of his rival while he risked losing his own. Slaughtering one helpless cripple seemed a travesty of Bushido. But Sano had pledged himself to this assassination, and he would shed his share of his enemy’s blood.

“Get out of the way,” Yanagisawa ordered Lady Nobuko.

The door to the outer corridor flew open with such a force that the paper panes and wooden lattice crumpled. A violent wind swept in from the garden, knocking Sano and the other men away from Lady Nobuko and Lord Ienobu. Sano heard Akiko scream, saw her and Reiko flung backward. A dark blur, like a mass of soot carried in by the wind, zoomed over the unconscious shogun. It engulfed Lady Nobuko and Lord Ienobu. Her hand popped open and the knife fell out. Terror wrenched her mouth and both her eyes wide open. She rose up from the floor, her feet kicking and arms flailing, and flew across the room. Her back struck the solid wooden partition. She slid down it and landed sitting on the floor, stunned. The blur lifted Lord Ienobu, who moaned in terror. Set on his feet, he wobbled. The wind abruptly died. The blur turned solid, gained human shape.

A shocked exclamation burst from Sano, Reiko, and their children: “Hirata!”

Hirata stood with one arm supporting Lord Ienobu. He looked leaner, stronger, but aged far beyond the years since Sano had last seen him. Rigid with an unnatural tension that clenched his jaw and tightened the muscles around his dark-shadowed eyes, he said, “Don’t come near him.” His speech sounded strained, forced.

Yoshisato said to Sano, “It’s your chief retainer?”

Yanagisawa said, “The traitor and fugitive?”

They were so astounded that they forgot to be angry that Hirata had disrupted their mission to kill Lord Ienobu. The gangsters made confused motions with their spears. Lord Ienobu shrank in fear from his savior. The shogun remained unconscious. Lady Nobuko sat like a broken doll; she’d fainted. His own knowledge about Hirata hadn’t prepared Sano for what he’d seen; Hirata’s powers were magnitudes greater than he’d thought. The confrontation that had been in the making for so long was now upon Sano, although this wasn’t a time, place, or audience he could have imagined. He and Hirata gazed at each other across the space of more than four years, a valley of bitter estrangement.

“That’s enough meddling.” Sano wouldn’t bother to rehash the past or hear excuses. He was so angry at Hirata for his latest crime—killing the shogun’s boy—that he just wanted Hirata gone and all ties between them severed. “Get out.”

Hirata’s expression filled with misery—he knew, and cared, how Sano felt—but he said, “I can’t. We have to protect Lord Ienobu. We have to make him the next shogun.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Yanagisawa demanded.

Lord Ienobu’s little jaw sagged with dismay. “It’s you that’s been helping me? Not the gods?”

“Yes,” Hirata said. “Me, and the ghost.”

“What ghost?” Yoshisato asked.

Fear of the supernatural trickled through Sano as he looked around for the spirit that had been manipulating Hirata from beyond the grave.

“Have you been leaving money on my doorstep?” Lord Ienobu asked, incredulous. “Did you kill my enemies?”

“The ghost of General Otani. He died during the Battle of Sekigahara. He made me kill them. He made me steal money and give it to you.” Hirata spoke fast, then was silenced as if by a hand squeezing his throat.