Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  The shinobi made a grunting noise that Daigoro took for assent. It made sense. Ships were faster than horses. If Shichio’s riders were already on Daigoro’s heels, then his sea captains might well have reached Izu by now. Daigoro had no doubt that Shichio would send ships. He had the might of Toyotomi Hideyoshi behind him, and a fleet to rival the Mongol hordes of old. Daigoro could not set sail until this storm blew itself out, and by then, the swiftest sloop ever put to sea would not be fast enough for him.

  “But where do we go now?” he said. “If the sea and the Tokaido are barred to us, the only paths I can see are to travel overland or to sprout wings—and I’m not sure the former is any more realistic than the latter.”

  “You overlook the obvious.”

  “Do I?” Daigoro scrunched his eyebrows and thought about it. The back roads were laid not by the great houses but by farmers. They connected villages, not cities or ports. Some ran nowhere at all; they tapered out halfway up a mountain, for reasons only the local grandfathers could remember. Few were charted, all were winding, and none were well maintained. A night like tonight would wash many of them out of existence.

  “I give up,” he said. “What is so ‘obvious’ here? Where the Tokaido has bridges, the lesser roads have fords. If this storm topples trees, they’ll be cleared from the Tokaido. Not so for the other roads. Shichio will hasten his wedding plans the moment he learns I am still alive. So tell me, how am I to outrace him by clambering over every obstacle between here and Izu? I don’t even know where here is.”

  “Childish. You have a mind like thin ice. No flexibility.”

  “And afraid it might crack? Is that what you think? That I’m afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then teach me to think like water, damn you. Show me what leeway I have to adapt. My enemy commands the oceans, riding the back roads will take weeks I do not have, and the Tokaido is watched.”

  “Not the Tokaido. You.”

  Daigoro’s shoulders slumped and his head sagged. “What difference could that possibly make?”

  “Obvious. Send me in your stead.”

  “That’s no solution. What I’m going to ask for is too outrageous for anyone but me to ask it.”

  “New disguises, then. Your limp, easy to hide. Your weapon, impossible. Do what must be done.”

  “Oh, no. If it weren’t for this sword, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I’m not getting rid of her now.”

  The shinobi snorted. “Then your mind is not clear after all. You are a child. As well ask for a square egg as to ask me to deliver you to your family’s home. You wish to be there without going there. You refuse straight paths and then complain of curves and corners. You would go without being seen, without surrendering that which makes you seen. Pah!”

  Daigoro made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Pain and weariness and despair bore down on him, so heavy that he wasn’t sure he could stand. He was desperate, he’d run out of options, and now he’d managed to aggravate even his unflappable companion. He’d never seen anyone display as much anger as this nameless man now captured in a single scowl. And this was his last friend in the world.

  He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. Even an hour would be enough. He was so tired he could hardly think. But Shichio’s riders could arrive at any moment. For the hunted man, rest was an enemy, not an ally.

  He forced himself to his feet. “You’re right,” he said, marshaling what little energy he had left. “I ask the impossible. But we have three advantages in our favor.”

  “Optimistic. Stupid.”

  Daigoro would not be deterred. “First, any good knife can make a round egg square. Second, my family’s compound is not our destination.”

  “I am to deliver you to Izu. To prevent your enemy from wedding your mother.”

  “Yes, but doing that from my mother’s house is impossible. The answer to that riddle lies in the house of Yasuda.”

  The furrows between the shinobi’s eyebrows grew deeper and darker. “This clan is unknown to me.”

  “To Shichio too. They’re just up the road from my family’s compound. Trust me; Shichio may have men on the road, but he won’t be watching House Yasuda itself.”

  “You are certain?”

  “Of course. Why waste the manpower? The Yasudas are no threat to him.”

  The shinobi breathed loudly through his nostrils. “You said three advantages. You named only two.”

  “Ah, yes,” Daigoro said with a smile. “The third is that I have you with me. And there’s no place the Wind cannot reach.”

  53

  Daigoro stood proudly at the wheel, his ketch in plain view of the fleet blockading the Izu Peninsula. His starched haori snapped in the crosswind, whose gusts were so powerful that Daigoro had to brace his feet against them. Sometimes he had to clutch the spokes or else be lifted bodily overboard. The storm he’d weathered had finally broken, but by no means had it blown itself out. There were still clouds all the way to the horizon, and all of them were in a foul, blustering mood.

  Another squall raked the ship, forcing him to hold tight to the wheel. His hands burned like hellfire. Fortunately his shinobi knew techniques for binding broken bones—techniques quite similar to Tomo’s, in fact—and like Tomo he’d bound Daigoro’s two broken fingers to a little curved splint. It allowed Daigoro to hold things like sword grips and the spokes of a ship’s wheel, but Daigoro feared the bones would mend in a curve, so that he’d never be able to fully straighten his right hand again.

  It was while his fingers were being bound that he got his first close look at the shinobi. The man’s hair was shorter than a grain of rice, and he wore a thick beard of the same length. Judging by his pug nose and flat face, he’d never walked away from a fistfight in his life. His forearms were covered in coarse black hair, more than Daigoro had ever seen on a human being. There were even traces of it on the digits of his fingers and the tops of his toes. Daigoro had never heard of a man having hair on his chest, but he’d seen tufts of it peeking out from the shinobi’s jacket. Between the hair and that growling voice, Daigoro found himself thinking of his companion as more animal than man.

  Daigoro had become something of an animal himself, sleeping under brambles and evading the eyes of men. He and his shinobi had used the storm’s fury to mask their escape. It broke Daigoro’s heart to abandon his favorite mare in the innkeeper’s stable, and with her his saddle, the only one of its kind. Both deserved a better fate than to be forgotten in the hands of a stranger, to be sold off at a whim, but his emotional attachment was exactly why he needed to leave his horse and tack behind. Anyone pursuing him would think not that he’d ridden off in the night but that he’d simply vanished. They would try to figure out where his body was buried before they ever thought to track a highborn princeling through the muck.

  By morning the storm had not slackened in the least. There was no sun, only a gradual lightening from black to gray. Rain became hail, pinging off Daigoro’s breastplate. At last he could go no farther, and he and his shinobi found a stand of wind-battered pines that would ward off the hailstones, if not the wet and the cold. The princeling would have been miserable beyond description, but Daigoro the outlaw just looked for a rock flat enough to serve as a pillow.

  Sora armor made a poor futon. He hadn’t managed even an hour of sleep, and awoke with his hips and back feeling just like his broken fingers. He cursed sleep for a beguiling temptress, and cursed the gods of wind and thunder for their spite of mortal man. There was no telling when the rain would change to hail, driving every sane person into shelter while Daigoro and his shinobi soldiered on.

  But no sooner did that thought strike him than he understood: the storm was the greatest gift the gods could bestow. Horses would not abide the hail. Daigoro’s mare was lucky to be left behind in her stall. So long as the gods remained fickle—so long as their rain could turn to hail on a whim—Shichio’s hired swords could never coax their mounts into t
he storm.

  Daigoro’s thinking had been wrong from the start. He’d confused his allies for enemies and his enemies for allies. Twice now, in the inn and under the pines, he’d wanted to sleep. The next time he would not forget: for the hunted man, sleep was a foe, not a friend. Even the hailstones, the worst of his tormentors, did him more good than harm. The real threat was a clear sky.

  That was the realization that unlocked the Toyotomi blockade: the most dangerous enemy was the innocuous one, the one that seemed like a friend. As soon as that dawned on him, he’d arrived at a decision: it was high time he came to learn the arts of naval warfare. He decided he would become a pirate.

  He and his shinobi had pressed on through a miserable day and a cold and miserable night. By the hour of the dog they’d put the worst of the storm behind them, and by midnight they’d reached their goal: a wharf, and in it a junk-rigged Toyotomi ketch rocking sleepily beside her quay. Dispatching the night watch had posed little difficulty; the shinobi was as silent as his own shadow, and Glorious Victory’s long reach was more than a match for any seaman’s dirk. Most of the crew were ashore, probably bedding whores and feeling thankful that they weren’t the ones stationed out in the rain. Together Daigoro and his shinobi made short work of the watchmen left aboard. They slipped the little ship’s hawsers unnoticed, and with a skeleton crew of two they rode the tide out to sea.

  Daigoro was no great sailor, but he’d lived his entire life on the coast, with his family’s harbor for a playground. He knew his way around a junk rig, and his shinobi was evidently an expert seaman. In fact, the man seemed to do everything with an expert hand. The Wind must have trained him since boyhood. He and Daigoro had that much in common: neither of them had ever been children. Daigoro spent his childhood learning swordsmanship, horsemanship, archery, calligraphy, poetry; the shinobi must have been raised on brewing poisons, moving silently, killing men with his bare hands. Daigoro wondered at what rigors the Wind must have put him through, and how many of its disciples survived the training.

  At first light Daigoro had caught sight of other Toyotomi sails on the horizon, and feared the crew of the hijacked ketch might have sounded the alarm. Then he’d realized the truth: the ships already at sea weren’t hunting him. They were just a part of Shichio’s fleet. They couldn’t have learned of Daigoro’s piracy, because the ketch’s crew had no one to sound the alarm to. They’d been alone in the harbor—hardly a typical deployment for naval vessels, so Daigoro could only surmise that Shichio must have stationed a ship in every last harbor along the coast. A lone ship was vulnerable, yes, but Shichio had a mind to place eyes and ears as widely as possible. No doubt he thought there was little risk of a crippled boy commandeering an entire warship on his own.

  But Shichio had underestimated the prowess of the Wind, and neither had he accounted for Daigoro’s own boldness. It was beyond bold to propose a two-man assault on a harbor; it was rash, even foolhardy, but Daigoro vowed he would make Shichio realize the danger of driving an enemy to desperation.

  Now, despite the pain in his fists, Daigoro wanted to howl at the sky. Shichio had made an animal of him, but not a mere cub. He was a prowler, a predator. As he approached the Toyotomi blockade, he felt the same hunter’s glee a tiger might feel as it slipped through tall grasses toward its prey. Hidden by nothing substantial, invisible nonetheless, the thrill of it made him feel he might actually grow claws.

  Perhaps the other captains might have hailed him if he’d made straight for House Okuma’s jetty, but Daigoro was too canny for that. He ran the blockade at its thinnest, giving the other crews no reason to point their spyglasses his way. Even if they had done so, he and his shinobi were both wearing Toyotomi colors, borrowed from dead men who no longer needed them. Shichio’s fleet was spread too thin; at this distance even a hawk wouldn’t notice the ketch had too few crewmen on deck.

  Daigoro had run the gauntlet. He would reach Izu after all.

  54

  The Green Cliff loomed over the road, tall and broad and steadfast. It was not, strictly speaking, a castle, but rather a wall surrounding House Yasuda’s largest compound. Not only was it the Yasudas’ sturdiest stronghold; it was arguably the most obdurate structure in all of Izu. Blessed by the gods of good fortune or else by kami dwelling deep in the rocks, the Green Cliff shrugged off earthquakes as easily as arrows. The land was weak just north and just south of the Green Cliff, falling away from the road in deep ravines that swallowed bridges whenever the tremors grew violent. Each time the Yasuda carpenters shored up the trestles and rebuilt the spans, and each time the Green Cliff stood fast.

  The typhoons that lashed Izu every autumn had no greater effect than the earthquakes. While other lords commissioned new roofs, new gates, even new walls, against House Yasuda the driving rains only brought more moisture for the verdant moss that gave the Green Cliff its name.

  Behind the Green Cliff, inside the Yasuda compound, banners of muted green snapped on their poles, causing the white centipedes adorning them to wriggle and slither. The same wind bent low the flames of Toyotomi fires, making them gutter and crackle and return all the stronger. Twenty fires, maybe more. They should not have been there.

  The little cookfires illuminated the skirts of long, multicolored tents with gently sloping roofs, pitched in two long columns like horses on a wagon team. Long banner poles flanked each tent, these ones bearing not the white centipede of House Yasuda but the black kiri flower of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. They should not have been there.

  The thought paced back and forth in Daigoro’s brain: they should not have been there. How had Shichio come to know of this place? Did his demon mask give him second sight? Or had he communed with actual demons, who spied on Daigoro from the pits of hell? Garrisons at the foot of Katto-ji made sense, or at the Okuma compound, but there was no reason to place House Yasuda under guard. Daigoro had told only one person of his true destination in Izu: the shinobi right next to him, who had not left Daigoro’s side since the night they’d disappeared into the storm.

  And yet there they were: Shichio’s sentries, dwarfed by the Green Cliff. Tiny points of firelight glinted on their spears. They should not have been there.

  Daigoro was too tired to think of anything else. For such a long time he’d been pushing himself forward on willpower alone, always with the thought of House Yasuda as a safe haven. Seeing it besieged was enough to break his spirit. There was nowhere left for him to go.

  His only refuge was the talus-strewn hilltop overlooking the Green Cliff. He could not even stand; he had to crawl from boulder to boulder, or else risk being seen. His shinobi moved like a spider, swift and effortless, but Daigoro’s shoulders and thighs burned from exertion. He crawled on his elbows because neither of his battered hands could take the weight.

  He assayed the Green Cliff once more, and the garrison encamped at its base. “They outnumber us twenty-five to one—and that counts only the enemy we can see. There’s no getting in there.”

  “You lack imagination.”

  Not true, Daigoro wanted to say. He could imagine a hundred ways in which these men might kill him. The biggest part of him wanted to get it over with. Just walk up to the gate. The sheer audacity of it might take the enemy by surprise, at least for a moment. Long enough to cut a few of them down before he died.

  There were fathers who raised their sons to think such recklessness was exactly what bushido required of them. They said anything less was cowardice. But Okuma Tetsuro had raised his sons differently. He taught them to think strategically, to avoid combat whenever possible, so that when they drew blood the world would know it was necessary and right. Above all, he’d taught his sons to be of good use to their clan. Daigoro knew he could serve his clan best by gaining an audience with Lord Yasuda Jinbei. He just couldn’t see how to make that happen.

  “Maybe we can get Lord Yasuda to come outside,” he whispered.

  “You said he is ill,” said his shinobi. “Bedridden.”

  And
has been for most of this year, Daigoro thought. Truth to tell, he couldn’t even be sure his old ally was still alive. No one would have sent word to him if Lord Yasuda had passed on. Daigoro had no standing now, no face, no family. He didn’t even have a home where he could receive the news.

  Daigoro set his jaw and steeled his mind. He was still samurai at heart, even if he’d given up any such claims in the eyes of the world. Speculating about worst-case scenarios was unbecoming of him. “To hell with it,” he said. “I’m going in there.”

  “Better,” said the shinobi. “At last you see clearly.”

  They retreated to the far slope of the hill, where they were impossible to see and less likely to be heard. Even so, they kept their voices low and their movements slow and seldom.

  “When I first hired you,” Daigoro said, “you didn’t know I intended you to deliver me here, neh? You thought I was making for my family’s compound?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought to encounter soldiers there?”

  “Many.”

  “What was your plan? How did you intend to get me inside?”

  “Walk through the front door. Kill as many as necessary to do so.”

  “Oh. Right.” I guess he doesn’t share my father’s beliefs about restraint, Daigoro thought. “And now?”

  “Impossible now. Had six then. Now there is only me.”

  “But you had a second plan in place, neh?”

  The shinobi nodded. “Sneak you in over the wall.”

  Daigoro could not keep the shock from his face. “That was your second plan? It’s easier than the first.”

  “No. Killing men is easy. Easier still to make them desert their posts. Much more difficult to move among them unseen.”

  “But that’s what you do. You’re shinobi.”

  “I am. Not you.”

  “And the message can only come from me.” Daigoro frowned. “It will do no good for Lord Yasuda to hear it from anyone else. But why can’t I just follow you over the wall?”