by Steve Bein
Oda closed his eyes and swallowed. “You wrote it in a letter too, the one that accompanied Yoshitomo when you sent him home with his swords. Is it true that you engraved it on a stupa to hallow where they fell?”
“I did.”
“Do you remember how you closed that letter?” Daigoro thought about it a moment and had to confess he did not. “You invited us to send a portion of Yoshitomo’s ashes to you, and promised to bury them at the stupa. That was the sentence that made my wife rip your letter to shreds. My scribe had to piece the scraps back together to copy the death poem just as you’d written it.”
Oda’s words fluttered in his throat. “I told my wife I would send you a bottle of my own piss before I sent you a single speck of her beloved son’s ashes. Now I break my vow to her. I refuse to recognize this debt you say my son incurred against your house. If he ruined your clan, you ruined mine. We are even. But I would not have Yoshitomo’s spirit wandering the earth in search of his final resting place. If I give you a vial of his ashes, will you bury it where he fell?”
“I swear it.”
“Then in exchange I will carry this letter of yours to the Lady in the North. Unopened and unread, upon my word. I ask only one thing of you: write it quickly, then be gone from my house.”
*
Daigoro was not as quick in writing his letter as his host might have liked. Katsushima readied their horses and still Daigoro hadn’t finished. Then Katsushima cajoled the healing woman in the kitchen into providing them with a little food for the ride. Daigoro only made negative progress: he set a candle flame to his first draft, scattered the ashes in the courtyard, and started afresh with a blank page.
It was hard to know what to write. He hadn’t forgotten what Aki had told him: don’t provide your enemy the means to defeat you. If Oda was as good as his word, then Daigoro could tell Nene anything he liked. If he was false, then Oda would betray him to Shichio at the first opportunity. It hardly mattered that Oda had never heard of Shichio. He’d already guessed Daigoro was a wanted man; he had only to announce Daigoro’s name and Shichio’s bear hunters would come straight to his door.
Thus if Daigoro set terms in his letter for how he and Nene should meet, he might as well write his own death poem. But if he did not set terms for meeting her, then how could they complete their pact? He needed a second audience with her, but it was too dangerous to nominate a place or a time.
“It’s dangerous to write anything,” Katsushima insisted. He knew the classics as well as Aki did. Sun Tzu’s famous maxim was at the core of Katsushima’s fighting style: He wins his battles by making no mistakes. The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity to defeat the enemy. “This letter opens you to defeat,” Katsushima said, standing above the little desk where Daigoro sat and wrote.
“Only if Lord Oda has forgotten the virtues of bushido.”
“No. He need not abandon them; he need only be distracted for a moment. Gold, sake, pettiness, grief; any of these might persuade him to forget his oath to you. He might come to regret his betrayal within the hour, but by then it will be too late.”
“All right, all right,” Daigoro said. “At least your version is easy to write.”
Dipping his brush, he wrote three words. I have it. Then he folded and sealed the letter and they made ready to leave.
36
I have it.
You clever boy, Nene thought. He was right not to trust his messenger. Oda Tomonosuke was a broken man. That much was clear by his windswept topknot and overlong fingernails. The man had managed to shave before meeting the most powerful woman in the empire, but that was all. The samurai prided themselves on bodily perfection, but even by a farmer’s standards, Lord Oda was a disheveled mess.
“Thank you so much for delivering this to me,” Nene said, suffusing her voice with deference and respect. She found men tended to give her what she wanted if she spoke to them in the same way she spoke to the emperor. “I know carrying a letter is far beneath your station.”
In truth that was almost all she knew about him. It was impossible to familiarize herself with all of her husband’s allies; by now his sworn daimyo numbered well over a hundred. Even so, Nene made it her business to memorize everything she could, and in the case of Oda Tomonosuke that was especially easy. The recent tragedies in his life were memorable: his son slain, his wife a suicide, his house destitute. The Odas were distant cousins to Oda Nobunaga, whom Nene audaciously considered a friend. Nobunaga had been the mightiest daimyo the empire had ever known, until that blackheart Akechi Mitsuhide ambushed him, trapped him in a temple, and set it ablaze. Hideyoshi had been swift to avenge Nobunaga. He sent Akechi straight to hell, and with Nene’s help he swiftly eclipsed his predecessor and mentor.
Nobunaga’s great regard for Nene was one of the reasons Hideyoshi took her seriously. Or, put another way, if not for Nobunaga, Nene might have been just another wife. For that, the least Nene owed him was to remember the names of his cousins, even the little lordlings like Oda Tomonosuke.
“It must have been hard for you, sitting down to tea with the man who killed your son,” she said.
“More boy than man,” said Oda. “And we didn’t sit down to tea. I gave him a clean bed and had my steward round up the healers, that’s all.”
“Healers? Oh, I do hope it’s nothing serious.”
Oda winced. “Damn my flapping tongue. And damn the pact I made with that murderous devil. My lady, I promised I would not betray Daigoro to his enemies. I’ll not name you an enemy, but … well, you understand. I was to bring you the letter, nothing more.”
Ah, but you’ve told me so much, Nene thought. The ride from Oda’s home in Ayuchi to Nene’s manor in the Jurakudai was about forty ri—a day’s ride for a messenger on a fleet horse, at least two days’ ride for a man of Oda’s years. Judging by his unkempt appearance, he was no longer a man with the energy and initiative to make the ride in two days. Call it three, she thought, and immediately she imagined how far the Bear Cub might have traveled from Ayuchi in that time. By sea, he could have returned to Izu, or sailed as far south as Shikoku. By the Tokaido, it was hard to guess. There were too many variables.
“Well, never mind your healers; let’s pretend I didn’t hear that.” She smiled at him sweetly. “I heard only that you are a noble and generous man, to go to great expense to shelter a boy who has done your family such harm. Why, just providing him horse fodder is no mean expense in times of war.”
“Too true—as Daigoro knows damn well. He didn’t even offer to pay.”
So the Bear Cub travels on horseback, she thought. It made sense; she remembered the boy walked with a limp. Her map changed shape in her mind. The Tokaido was well maintained and patrolled; riders could travel with little fear of bandits, yamabushi, or sudden holes where their horses might break a leg. Her own messages could travel nearly a hundred ri in a single day, but that was because Toyotomi couriers had relay stations all along the Tokaido. No horse could cover that distance so swiftly on its own.
A lone boy, recently injured, on a well-fed horse. How far could he ride in three days? Would he risk the Tokaido, or did he still fear spies on the great roads? If he still rode with that woolly-haired ronin of his, the two of them might simply slaughter Shichio’s bear hunters wherever they found them. On the other hand, Daigoro was not one to walk into a trap and then figure out how to cut his way free of it. The safer path was to ride the back roads.
Again the map changed its contours in Nene’s mind. If he held to the great roads, he might be anywhere within, say, sixty ri of Lord Oda’s compound—including just outside my door, she realized with a start. Why was he not here already, and why had he not come with Streaming Dawn? That would have made matters so easy.
But there were no unwatched roads to Kyoto. Daigoro probably feared Shichio still had spies here. Nene shared the same worry herself; she could never be sure she’d rooted out every las
t one. No, the Bear Cub would not make himself seen if he did not have to. He would not come to her; she would have to find him, and that would not be easy. In all likelihood he traveled overland.
That would be slow going—and as the thought occurred to her, it dawned on her that she had no idea just how slow. Those pathways were entirely outside her ken. She knew how far her palanquin could bear her in a day, encumbered as it was by her entourage. She had a rough idea of how far her husband’s troops could range on a march, and on a forced march. But how far a ronin could cross the wilds? Nene could not even hazard a guess.
She needed more information, and poor Oda had no defenses against her. “Didn’t it frighten you to have this boy under your roof? I hear he’s a ferocious warrior.”
“Ferocious? He was half dead. No, his man Katsushima is the one to fear.”
So Daigoro and Katsushima still ride together, Nene thought. And they are probably penniless, since Daigoro—a polite boy—did not offer to pay for horse feed. “I see. But once you were on the road, he wasn’t your guest anymore, neh? You must have been worried about crossing paths with him then.”
“Hardly. If he were riding west, he could have carried his own damned letter—oh, curse me for a jabbering fool. I should not have said that, my lady.”
“Of course, of course. I’m frightfully sorry; I never meant to make a noble samurai break his oath. We won’t speak another word of him—but I shan’t let you go just yet. It’s late, and I won’t send you off without a good meal. Let’s talk about something else, shall we? Something wholesome and innocent.”
Even idle chatter about the weather divulged the information she needed to know. When Oda told her he’d enjoyed cloudless skies on his ride to her home, he said by implication that Daigoro’s little-used trails would be dry, not muddy. When Oda said he hadn’t seen any major storms since that typhoon last month, he might just as well have said that Daigoro would find every ford to be shallow and slow. Oh, you poor man, Nene thought. You have no flair for this game.
He’d come to deliver three words—I have it—and now he’d given Nene a soliloquy. Daigoro was badly hurt but on the mend, he and Katsushima rode together, the two of them departed Ayuchi three days ago, and now they were heading east and making good time. If Oda had wanted to fulfill his promise to the boy, he should never have stepped out of the saddle. Better to trot through the gate, put the letter in Nene’s hand, and leave like a stranger. The moment he opened his mouth, he was lost.
Purely out of habit she wondered what use she might put him to. It was an old reflex, like a merchant biting a piece of gold to test it. In truth it embarrassed her. She ought not to think of men like Oda as playing pieces. Naive nobility was still noble, was it not? He didn’t deserve to be manipulated. But her husband’s needs and the good of the empire took precedence over obligations to a dead friend’s cousin.
The unfortunate truth was that this Oda Tomonosuke was a useful tool. He was a sword master once, wasn’t he? Nene questioned her memory for a moment, but one glance at Oda’s hands erased all doubt: they were meaty and strong, as callused as an oarsman’s. Yes, he was a kenjutsu sensei after all. And who had just taken up the sword? Shichio.
She could be so kind to both of them. For Shichio, the only thing better than an expert sword master would be one with intimate knowledge of the Bear Cub. If Nene judged Oda rightly, nothing would swell his sails like becoming a proper sensei again. Shichio would be a dismal student, childish and temperamental, but he would be a paying student. Clearly Oda needed the money—and, come to think of it, he’d also benefit from the distraction. That much was genuine sympathy on Nene’s part: Oda was coming apart at the seams. Taking on a student might make him feel like a man again.
He could use a friend too, one who promised to write him regularly—a friend like Nene. He was too noble to knowingly betray Shichio, but she did not need him to be a mole. She needed him only to be himself, and to accidentally divulge all the countless details of Shichio’s life.
“Do you know, I’ve just thought of someone you should meet,” she said, deliberately sounding as if she had surprised herself. “My husband has a general who—you won’t tell a secret, will you?” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The men say he’s better known for his penmanship than his swordsmanship.”
“Disgraceful.”
“Neh? But he wants to do better, and … well, I didn’t think of it before because General Shichio is so far from here, but now … oh, I do hope you’ll pardon me for saying so, but after your wife’s passing, and your son’s … I know it’s terribly rude of me… .” She made herself sound weak and indecisive. Oda would feel stronger if she gave him the opportunity to reassure her.
Inevitably, he took the bait. “It’s all right, my lady. Please, speak your mind. You needn’t be shy with me.”
“Well, I wonder if it might do you some good to get away for a little while. If it’s not too much trouble. This general is stationed all the way in Kanagawa-juku. But I’m sure he’ll pay handsomely for a sword master of your caliber. Come to think of it”—she lowered her voice conspiratorially again—“my honored husband will pay you too. It shames him to have a general who hardly knows which end of the sword to hold.”
A fleeting twinge passed over Oda’s face. Nene knew why. Her husband was no swordsman either. Like Shichio, he lacked the patience for martial art—though in his defense, Hideyoshi’s impatience was not like Shichio’s. Shichio was like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. Hideyoshi was more like a randy teenager surrounded by naked women.
“Well, please consider it, Oda-sensei. It would be my honor to recommend you—”
“And your recommendation is all the honor a man like me requires.” Oda bowed deeply. Already he seemed like a younger man. He came up from his bow with his shoulders squared and his chest puffed ever so slightly. “Do you know, my lady, just the other day I told that Okuma boy my warring days are behind me. Perhaps I spoke prematurely. It will be my greatest privilege to support General Toyotomi’s war effort in whatever way I can.”
“I do hope so,” Nene said with a smile. “And please, do not take it amiss if I write you a letter now and again. If I am to blame for sending you into the back of beyond, then the least I can do is keep you abreast of what is afoot at home.”
“It would be my honor and my pleasure.”
“And you’ll write back to me?”
That puffed him up even further. A strong man always wants the attentions of a woman, Nene thought. Even a woman he can never have, and especially a woman who knows she cannot have him.
“Oh, you’ve made me so happy,” she said, speaking again with perfect honesty. “I’m sure there is no better place for you than at General Shichio’s side.”
37
“‘I have it’? That’s all it said? ‘I have it’?”
Nene’s errand boy was holding out on him. Shichio knew it damn well. He misliked the look of this man from the moment he blustered through Shichio’s gate. His name was Nezumi, and he had a cocky swagger unbefitting a common messenger. He wore clean white and darkest black, with a black hachimaki restraining his wild hair. His teeth were brown and broken, and he exposed their hideousness with a ready smile.
“That’s all,” Nezumi said. “But the courier said more than the letter.”
Shichio sighed irritably. “Are you an actor on a stage? Is it your job to keep me in suspense? No. Out with it, or else it’s out with your tongue and I’ll have you write down anything more you need to tell me.”
Nezumi bit his lip when he smiled, exposing those bestial teeth all the more. “Heh heh. That would be unwise.”
“Because you’re unlettered?”
“Because my lady likes me. There could be … what’s the word? Reprisals.”
I have no fear of Lady Nene, Shichio wanted to say. Now more than ever he wished it were true. If only she were a wife and not a sister-figure, he could have her killed and deflect Hashi
ba’s wrath afterward. Perhaps he might even persuade Hashiba to punish him by stripping him of his swords. Once Shichio was demoted back to the peasantry, he could grow his hair back. As it was, he was forever worried about a sunburned scalp. He’d burned it once already and the pain was terrible.
Even now, standing on his veranda with this sweating messenger kneeling in his shadow, he worried about his shaven pate. He eyed Nezumi’s dusty legs with disdain but bade him inside anyway. Once he was inside, Nezumi was a guest, so Shichio had no choice but to feed him. To do otherwise was unbecoming of a hatamoto of the great Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
“The courier,” he said after a maid fetched a little tea. “What did he say?”
“Everything.” There was that brutish smile again. “He vowed never to betray the Bear Cub, and to deliver that letter without saying a word. Then he ran straight to Lady Nene and told her all he knew.”
“I like him already. Who was he?”
“Lord Oda Tomonosuke. A swordsman of some repute.”
“And more than an errand boy, unless I miss my guess. Couriers do not have lordships or surnames. So why should this one be reduced to carrying messages back and forth like a pigeon?”
“You mean like me? Heh.”
By the gods, those brown teeth were hideous. “Yes, yes. Now out with it. Samurai are not known for their humility, and neither are they known to break a sworn oath. Why should this Oda fellow deign to serve a crippled boy as a messenger, and why should he break his word?”
“Hard to say what goes on in another man’s mind, but I expect he did the first one in order to do the second.”
“Because?”
“The Bear Cub killed his son in a duel.”
“Did he now?” That was an interesting development. This Oda must have some personal connection to Nene, or else he would not have been granted an audience. Shichio could use a spy with Nene’s confidence, and his hatred for Daigoro might be just the thing to sway Oda’s loyalty. Shichio had deployed spies, troops, ships, and a mountain of gold to capture the Bear Cub. If Oda were to learn of that—accidentally, of course—then he might be manipulated into approaching Shichio to seek an alliance.
