by Steve Bein
“I don’t see much anymore, Inspector.”
Mariko turned for the stairs. “I think we’re all through here, sir. I’ll let you know if we turn up anything.”
“Oh, Inspector,” he called after her, “if it matters to your investigation, the sword is worth a lot of money.”
“Because it controls destiny?”
“No. Because it’s almost nine hundred years old.”
“Uh-huh. We’ll get back to you, sir.”
She left the old man’s apartment clenching and unclenching her fists, reminding herself there was only one way to beat Ko. She’d outlast him. He’d heap shit like this on her, and she’d keep taking it until he had no more shit to shovel.
She sure as hell hoped he’d run out soon.
BOOK TWO
KAMAKURA ERA, THE YEAR 124
(1308 CE)
7
Silence fell on the hillside. Orange and gold leaves of autumn drifted lazily to the ground, more of them below than still in the branches. One fell on the face of Lord Kanayama Osamu, his pallor contrasting sharply with the rich redness of the leaf. Most of his blood had already dyed the leaves on the ground in a uniform river of dark crimson. His body was gashed open across the spine, a deep cut from left shoulder to right hip, and his face still bore the crazed snarl he had worn in combat.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Saito Toshiro stared down at his fallen commander, lungs still heaving, blood pounding an adrenaline-charged rhythm against his eardrums.
“Neither have I,” said Nakadai Minoru, sheathing his tachi at his hip. “Not at Kamakura, not at Higashiyama, never.” The two men were in many ways the opposite of each other. While Saito was lean and towering in his armor, Nakadai was fully a head shorter and almost as broad as he was tall. Saito had a face of leather, bronzed by the sun and hardened by years of combat. Nakadai had cheeks like red apples and deep, narrow, glinting slits for eyes, like two black marbles pressed into a ball of dough. Both wore the armor and topknot that marked them as samurai, as well as the twin swords, but standing next to each other, Nakadai looked almost like a bull, Saito a weathered tree.
“He fought like a madman,” Saito said. “No—like a rabid dog. I don’t understand it.”
“Yes. By all rights we should be the ones lying here, not him. It’s too bad; he deserved a better death than this.”
Lord Kanayama had been, among other things, one of the most renowned swordsmen in the Owari territory. He had also been samurai, lord of the castle at Gifu, daimyo of the surrounding fief, and an ally and confidant to Lord Ashikaga Owari-no-kami Jinzaemon, overlord of Owari. Up until a few days ago, Kanayama was one of Lord Ashikaga’s generals, and the commanding officer of both Saito and Nakadai. In times of war, Lord Kanayama’s counsel was always esteemed, and with a blade in his hands he was unrivaled within a hundred ri. But yesterday morning he was to have committed seppuku, his punishment ordered by Lord Ashikaga on charges of treason. And, that morning at dawn, Kanayama had instead taken his swords and his two fastest horses, and fled across the Owari plains.
The first of these horses he rode into the ground. The second, stronger than the first, carried him all the way through the night until it broke a foreleg in his mad dash across the Kiso River. From there Kanayama had fled on foot, where it had taken some thirty hours for Saito, Nakadai, and a dozen warriors to chase him down on Ashikaga’s orders. And now, on this isolated hillside, he had doomed himself to suffer a dog’s death at the hands of his own retainers.
“I cannot understand it,” Saito said as he began to clean the blood from his blade. “If he had simply committed seppuku he could have died with honor. Instead, this! Fleeing like a common thief, hacking at us as if he’d never touched a sword…By all gods, when he kicked you, I couldn’t believe my eyes!”
That kick had sent Nakadai’s girth tumbling through a thorny bramble, breaking two ribs and slicing every exposed inch of skin a hundred times over. Nakadai was lucky; anyone who stepped within striking distance of Kanayama Osamu usually met with a swift death. The kick did more than dispatch Nakadai; it also off-balanced Kanayama and allowed Saito to sidestep his next crazed slash. Saito had taken a superficial cut to the forearm on that exchange, but in return Kanayama had exposed his back, and Saito spun and sliced him from shoulder to hip.
“It makes no sense.” Nakadai nodded in agreement, looking at the body in disbelief. “I should be a headless corpse, and you should be bleeding to death from the stump of your sword arm, waiting for the lord to cut you down. There was no reason to his attacks, just madness. Perhaps what they say about his sword is true…?”
“Nonsense,” Saito said immediately. “He was exhausted. He had been riding for days. He could have been injured when his horse fell at the river.”
“That may be, but at Inuyama I saw him slay four men single-handedly, and that was after he took an arrow through the shoulder.”
“I cannot explain it,” Saito admitted. “Maybe he went mad. Nothing else would explain his turn against Lord Ashikaga.”
“Nothing, except the sword.”
Saito scoffed. “Put that out of your head. Are you a farmer’s woman? Do you also believe goblins will take your children away in the night? It is an Inazuma blade! A sword without equal! Of course there will be legends attached to it.”
“Not legends like these,” said Nakadai.
“Get a hold of yourself! Legends were spoken of the lord himself. Do you truly believe he killed a hundred men at Kamakura? Neither do I, but that is what the villagers say of him. Choose, my friend, whether you are peasant or samurai. Do you honestly believe spirits can control swords?”
Nakadai’s head dropped for a moment. When it rose again, his fat cheeks were split in a smile. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Our lord’s death must be distracting me.” He shook his head as if to throw off the last traces of a bad dream. “I’m sorry. Now, shall we fetch our retainers and return to Lord Ashikaga?”
Saito’s eyes fell to the body once more. “You go ahead. Someone has to prepare the head and compose his death poem.”
Nakadai nodded and Saito watched him amble up the hillside, on his way to find the dozen bushi who had accompanied them on the chase. Saito and Nakadai were the best horsemen among the group and had been able to navigate their mounts deeper through the forest than any of the others. Eventually the trees had become so dense that they too were forced to dismount. The pursuit continued on foot, while the horses stayed obediently where they were left. Saito assumed that wherever Nakadai found their horses, he would also find their retainers.
That didn’t leave much time. As soon as Nakadai’s round figure plodded out of sight, Saito’s gaze fell back on the body of his fallen master. It lay there, legs crossed over each other, the torso twisted in an impossible pose as the spine and rib cage no longer held it to a normal human shape. Kanayama’s right hand still gripped the handle of his tachi, which was so sharp that it sank half its length into the ground when its wielder fell.
Saito prayed it had not struck a rock when it dropped. He drew the Inazuma blade out of the earth, sighing when he saw that no stone had ground away the perfection of its edge. Inazuma, the weapon’s creator, was a sword smith the world would not see the likes of again for generations. Of course he had taken apprentices, but none of them had been able to replicate the genius of the master himself, and after his death the Inazuma school dropped out of existence. That was two hundred years ago, and his legacy only remained in blades such as this, a treasure Saito never believed he would have the honor to wield in his lifetime.
Saito was quite a swordsman himself, even among samurai. Nothing along the lines of Lord Kanayama, but still, he was more skilled than most. In addition to the fencing practice that all samurai made their purpose in life, Saito was also a longtime student of iaidō, the art of drawing the sword. He prided himself on the speed of his draw, on how fluidly it flowed into cuts and parries and counterstrikes. A master
of iaidō could draw, cut, and resheathe his blade before his enemy’s corpse hit the ground. Saito was not there yet, but he was trying.
As it happened, this particular blade was forged by the master Inazuma especially for iaidō. It was named Beautiful Singer for the whistle of the tachi’s edge as it flashed out of its scabbard. An iaidō sword had to be lighter than most tachi for better speed on the draw; this one felt as if its mass was suspended by muscles of its own, an extension of Saito’s arm, weightless.
It was truly a masterpiece. To send it to the afterlife with Lord Kanayama would have been criminal. It was no dishonor to take the sword. No dishonor at all. If the only way to rescue a masterpiece was to steal it from a dead man, he told himself, then stealing was neither craven nor shameful.
And the rumors surrounding the blade couldn’t possibly be true. Saito laughed at the thought as he examined the blade in a beam of sunlight. He wiped its gleaming surface clean, admired the reflection it captured of the leaves above. It is an Inazuma blade, he thought. Of course there will be stories. Men would kill—men have killed—to possess a sword such as this. Where such treasures are concerned, the imagination is sure to wander.
Saito gave the sword a final polishing and, withdrawing his own tachi, sheathed his late master’s weapon in his own scabbard. It fit well enough—not perfectly, but not so loose as to rattle free. Then, removing the inimitable weapon and its sheath from his belt, he sat down and quickly unwound the cord wrappings from both swords’ handles. Then he switched them, rebinding the Inazuma with the wrap from his own sword. Though it felt like a violation of Bushido in his gut, in his head he was certain it was not. He tried to convince his gut of that as he switched the braided cords wrapping the scabbards, binding his own around the one carved for Beautiful Singer.
Apprehension gnarled his brow as he eyed the tsuba, the round metal hand guards on each sword; switching those would take more time and tools than he had available. The illusion would not be complete. But then, it should not need to be. There would be no reason for anyone to examine the sword Saito wore on the trip home. If the others were loyal at all, their grief over the master’s honorless death would overwhelm any other concerns.
Once the handle and scabbard of the Beautiful Singer were bound, Saito hastily rewrapped his own sword with the orange-and-yellow cord taken from Lord Kanayama. With both weapons disguised, he thrust Kanayama’s magnificent prize through his own belt and returned his old sword to the late master. It was then that he heard voices approaching over the ridge. With one silent movement, Saito regained his feet and drew the Inazuma sword. The peerless blade glittered as it struck the head from Kanayama’s body. The blood was minimal, most of it having already turned the ground to red mud, but Saito cleaned his new weapon anyway. As he whipped it through the air to resheathe it, the blade truly sang, its song high-pitched, nearly inaudible, yet nonetheless unforgettable. Though he could never explain how, Saito was immediately aware that this song had words, and in that moment he knew his fallen master’s death poem:
The glorious sun,
nigh on reaching its zenith,
shaded by my hand.
“That’s perfect,” Nakadai said later when Saito recited the poem to him. “Yes, the lord himself could not have composed better. Too bad that it’s all too true.”
“What?” Saito looked up at his friend, distantly aware that Nakadai had spoken. The whistling song of the sword still clung to the air, washing over everything else.
“The master’s life,” Nakadai observed. “Surely you see it. He was the sun, shaded just as he was the coming to the peak of his skills. Or have you written a poem better than you even knew yourself?”
“No…the poem wrote itself for me.”
Nakadai laughed. “Well, then, perhaps you’ve attained a glimpse of enlightenment. Maybe you should shave that old topknot and join a monastery.” Nakadai chuckled again, but Saito bristled at the thought of retiring his weapons and his station as samurai. He forced a laugh all the same.
They agreed to build a pyre for Kanayama’s body just outside the woods, for it was possible that Lord Ashikaga would not allow a proper funeral if they carried the body home. Despite whatever demon had taken hold of the master in his final days, for most of his life Kanayama had been an indomitable warrior and the object of unquestioned loyalty.
The sun had set by the time they’d gathered the mountain of wood they needed, for to burn their lord’s very bones to ashes, they needed heat one usually found only in the heart of a forge. At Saito’s suggestion, Kanayama’s swords were burned along with the body. The lord should die with at least that much honor, he argued. Nakadai quickly agreed: if the ghost stories were true, he said, they would be doing the world a favor by committing the Inazuma blade to the flames. In the blazing light of the late-night fire, no one seemed to notice the tsuba on Lord Kanayama’s sword, and no one mentioned the hand guard of the late lord’s weapon at Saito’s hip.
This is no dishonor, Saito told himself. A samurai is to make himself a living sword. Just as the lord does not lightly commit his loyal samurai to battle, a samurai should not lightly let a masterwork sword be destroyed. No, he thought. No dishonor at all.
8
Lord Ashikaga Owari-no-kami Jinzaemon was as fearsome as he was powerful. His reign over Owari was unquestioned; by now all his intelligent enemies has simply decided it was easier to wait until the old tyrant died, hoping the Ashikaga heir would not be blessed with the same demonic cunning as the father. The Owari territory was coveted land, to be sure, and every neighboring warlord deeply wished to wrest it from Ashikaga’s control. Its long, narrow bay was protected by peninsulas on either side, making it a natural port with geological protection from the all-too-common threat of typhoons. Mountains to the north and west provided further protection against threats of a military nature. The Owari plains were rich rice-yielding bounty, and to make the prize even more tempting, Ashikaga’s armies were far smaller than the forces at his enemies’ command. But with mountains and the sea protecting his flanks, Ashikaga could devote all his limited manpower to the protection of his eastern front, an easily defensible position for such a masterful general.
Once long ago two rival warlords attacked Owari simultaneously, one with naval power and one by land. Lord Ashikaga routed both of them, devoting only half his forces to each. The first he flanked on both peninsulas as the boats stormed the port, enclosing the enemy in an ever-narrowing V of arrow fire. Flaming arrows did as much damage to ships as steel did to flesh, and the attack was broken off before the first sailor reached the shore. The land invaders were allowed to penetrate deep into the plains before the second half of Ashikaga’s troops cut them off from behind and razed their supply lines. The enemy headed south, only to be cut off by archers returning from the sea battle. Turning west, the invaders encountered more archers returning from the opposite peninsula. Surrounded by troops on three sides and mountains on the fourth, the enemy was left to starve for a week in fertile cropland that was unfortunately three months away from the harvest. Both maneuvers were so surprising and so devastatingly fast that the opposing generals had no choice but to believe that Ashikaga’s entire army was deployed on the plains and on the sea coast at the same time, and that any general who could simultaneously deploy the same army on two separate fields of battle should be left to die in his own province unmolested, with the hopes that such inhuman skill would not be inherited by his successor.
For all his might and cleverness, Ashikaga was an ugly man. His face was like a skull with leather pulled taut across it, cheekbones cutting the sharp lines one might find in a prisoner’s face after two weeks without food. On the left side a razor-straight line ran back from his mouth to a missing earlobe, its path a thick white hairless scar. His topknot and eyebrows were bushy gray, standing in sharp contrast to the ruddy skin permanently bronzed by years of harsh battlefield sun. His body bore the marks of combat as well, but by far the worst of his scars was th
e sickening twisted knot on his throat. In his youth an archer had put an arrow through Ashikaga’s gullet, and only by the grace of some buddha or demon did he survive. It was said he killed two more men that day before stopping to remove the shaft. Some said he even went back and hunted down the man who shot him. Eventually he recovered from the wound, but the healing had twisted the skin of his neck in an eddy of scar tissue, as cloth would twist around the haft of a spear. His vocal cords did not escape the damage. It was more than a year before he could speak again or even turn his head, and ever since, his voice had been more of a growl, gravel under a wagon’s wheels, the roll of distant thunder.
To Saito it didn’t matter whether the arrow had actually pierced the lord’s throat or only grazed him, whether he really did stalk down that archer or whether his revenge was no more than a tall tale. If a man rose to such stature that people made up legends about him and recited them as if they were true, that was testament enough to his ability. Saito would always refer to the lord as Ashikaga-dono instead of the -san used for equals or even the -sama he’d used for Lord Kanayama. He would always honor Ashikaga as a warrior and liege lord, regardless of what superstitious foot soldiers whispered in the ranks about hungry ghosts coming back to life.
Saito had been summoned to his general’s audience chamber to offer his report on the death of Lord Kanayama. Ashikaga let out a sharp half laugh when Saito recounted the kick that sent his companion through the bramble. “Do you expect me to believe Kanayama Osamu would strike a man when he had a sword in his hands?” The wolfish voice was bitter with disbelief. “Why did he not simply cut him down? What are you trying to hide from me?”
“Nothing, Ashikaga-dono. Nothing I have said so far would shield the late lord of any shame. You want the truth from me and that is what I have given you. I cannot explain his actions; he lost all semblance of control. I was loyal to him for many years, but Lord Kanayama died without honor and it was to spare him further dishonor that I took his head. If you still believe I am a liar, please allow me to commit seppuku to protest my innocence.”
