Hatsumi let him fall at her feet and turned back to Kazuko. “Look at what you made me do!”
In Hatsumi’s wake, she had left a terrible, cloying miasma. Like the stench of the ichor that had once flowed in Hakamadare’s veins.
Kazuko cast about for some sort of weapon, but Tsunetomo had taken his swords. Her dagger, a beautiful gift from her father, was wrapped in silk in a black-lacquered box in a cabinet on the far side of the room, replaced after the night Kazuko had sat by Hatsumi’s side.
“It’s all because of him!” Hatsumi shrieked.
Kazuko backed away from the other woman, toward the cabinet. Her voice trembled. “Who?”
Hatsumi followed, step by step. That grating sneer again, “The ronin!”
Kazuko gasped.
“Yes, I saw him the day he arrived with all those other scurrilous vagabonds! And you have seen him, too! Out there pretending he’ll ever be anything but a filthy bandit! Oh, I heard your cute little sighs back then, the way you wanted to sell your honor for less worth than a ball of rice. You slut!”
Hatsumi knew of Ken’ishi’s presence, and she knew that Kazuko had loved him, in her heart at least. Did she know they had consummated her love? What would she do with that knowledge? Kazuko bumped up against the cabinet. Hatsumi advanced, claws clenching at her sides.
“Please, Hatsumi,” Kazuko said, “Calm yourself! Let us talk about this like sisters! Please!”
“No more lies!” Hatsumi’s voice rose to a ragged wail. “We were never sisters, no matter how much I wished it!”
“What do you want?” Kazuko reached behind her, slowly, fingers seeking the bronze clasp of the gilded cabinet doors.
“Renounce the filthy ronin forever! Better yet, have him executed! Only his death will satisfy me!” Hatsumi stood two paces away now.
“How can I do that? He has done neither of us any harm. He saved your life, Hatsumi!” Her hand was on the latch. The flick of a finger spun it open.
Hatsumi’s eyes blazed. “No harm? No harm! He destroyed us! He took your heart away from me! He let you escape! And I...I...”
Kazuko slipped a fingernail into the crack between the doors, pried them open ever so slightly. The box with the dagger lay on the bottom shelf. “I don’t love him anymore. I love my husband.”
Hatsumi stepped so close, her wretched breath washed over Kazuko. “You lie. I see it in your face. No one in the world knows you better than I do, little Kazuko. You will tell your husband of the ronin’s crimes and have him executed. Or else I will tell your husband!”
Rage flared in Kazuko, drowning all caution. She shoved Hatsumi back with both hands, with all her strength. Pushing Hatsumi felt like trying to shove a tree away, but Hatsumi floundered backward a step. Kazuko spun, whipped open the cabinet door, snatched the box, and whirled back just in time to catch Hatsumi lunging for her throat.
Hatsumi’s eyes blazed with heat like flaring coals. Her rough-clawed hands clamped around Kazuko’s neck, cutting off her air. With both hands, Kazuko smashed the lacquered box, emblazoned with the Nishimuta clan mon, against Hatsumi’s face. The box splintered. Hatsumi staggered back, shrieking more in surprise than pain, releasing Kazuko’s tender throat.
A silk-wrapped cylinder thumped onto the tatami. Kazuko lunged for it. Hatsumi lunged for her. Through the silk, Kazuko felt the hilt of the tanto. Hatsumi’s hand closed around the scabbard. Kazuko pulled hard. The silk slipped out of Hatsumi’s grasp, and Kazuko managed to unfurl it. Hatsumi plowed into her.
Kazuko jerked the tanto free of its scabbard and thrust it into Hatsumi’s chest.
Hatsumi halted, her claws a mere finger’s breadth from Kazuko’s face, a look of profound surprise on her twisted visage. She stepped back, and the dagger slid out of her with a tight slurp. What dripped from the blade was not crimson blood, but a venomous black ichor, a rancid putrescence that filled the air with noxious malignance.
Hatsumi’s face melted into anguish, like a child who had just been slapped by her mother for the first time. Her bottom lip quivered. “No...”
Kazuko brandished the dagger. “Stay back!”
Hatsumi looked back and forth several times between the dagger and Kazuko’s face, then at the blackness staining her fingers from the wound in her chest.
Loosing a horrific scream so loud that Kazuko fell back and covered her ears, Hatsumi launched herself at the nearest window. She crashed through the shutters like an ox plowing through a rotten fence. Kazuko gasped and leaped to the window. They were five stories above the courtyard.
Below, Hatsumi’s body lay amidst splintered wood on the hard-packed earth, her limbs twisted at grotesque angles.
Tears burst into Kazuko’s eyes. Was it finally over? Why did she feel only relief?
Cries of consternation and surprise from nearby warriors echoed up toward Kazuko. Several men began to converge on Hatsumi’s twisted shape.
Hatsumi’s foot twitched.
A bolt of dread shot through Kazuko. “No, get away from her!” she tried to shout, but it came out as a whisper.
Before Kazuko could gather her voice, Hatsumi sprang to her feet, pounced upon the nearest man, and tore out his throat with her claws, sending a fan-shaped spray of crimson across the earth. He collapsed with a gurgling scream.
The other men jumped back and drew their swords. Hatsumi’s blood-red glare swung once more up toward the window where she must have felt Kazuko’s eyes upon her. The look of rage and betrayal and anguish on Hatsumi’s face would be burned into Kazuko’s memory forever.
Then Hatsumi rushed through the ring of samurai, bounded over the wall to the next ring of fortifications below, and disappeared from sight.
Kazuko listened at the window for as long as she could as the cries and shouts left in the wake of Hatsumi’s flight echoed into nothingness.
Oh the anguish of these secret meetings
In the depth of night,
I wait with the shoji open.
You come late, and I see your shadow
Move through the foliage
At the bottom of the garden.
We embrace—hidden from my family.
I weep into my hands.
My sleeves are already damp.
We make love, and suddenly
The fire watch loom up
With clappers and lantern.
How cruel they are
To appear at such a moment.
Upset by their apparition,
I babble nonsense
And can’t stop talking
Words with no connection.
—The Love Poems of Marichiko
The deaths of the two men, one of them Lord Tsunetomo’s personal valet, shattered the castle’s spirit like a discordant gong.
The tales grew wilder at every telling. Some said Lady Kazuko’s handmaid had been possessed by an evil spirit; others said Kazuko herself had become an oni; still others said the oni had been a servant. But many witnesses agreed how the demon woman leaped over the castle’s concentric fortifications in great bounds, with a terrible keening that could have been laughing or weeping. After murdering six townspeople and spreading a great panic through the rest of town, she disappeared into the forest.
Ken’ishi had not witnessed the incident, as he had been drilling with his men that morning, but his ear had caught the horrific wail echoing through the castle environs, a wail that had raised the hairs at the nape of his neck.
Later that day, Captain Tsunemori and the other officers addressed the men, assuring them that Lord Tsunetomo and Lady Kazuko were in good health, and explained that the culprit, the lady’s handmaid, Hatsumi, had been going mad over the course of several months.
Tsunemori said, “We seek volunteers to go after her. She must be found and stopped.”
From the ranks of troops seated around Tsunemori’s dais, Ken’ishi was the first to stand. He did not know Hatsumi well, but somehow he felt connected to what had happened to her. Responsible for her, maybe.
After all, it had been his arrival on the scene three years past that interrupted the rape and stopped Hakamadare from killing Hatsumi. Perhaps Hakamadare’s evil had tainted her somehow. He was doubtless the only man here who had ever killed an oni as well.
Fifty men volunteered. It seemed a lot of men to capture one woman, but the forested hills around Hita town afforded bountiful places to hide. The searchers clad themselves in light armor and carried bows, nets, and ropes. They were ordered to capture her if possible, but not at the expense of any more lives.
Ken’ishi took his Otomo clan katana with him. Others carried lances.
One man said, “I saw what she did to Matsunari. These nets will not hold her.”
Captain Tsunemori took charge, a fact that surprised most, as he was too high-ranked to lead so small a party. Nevertheless, the determination on his face was earnest, and suggested he knew more than what the men had been told. “She must not be allowed to stain the honor of the family, or of the clan,” was all he said.
While Tsunemori and a dozen of Tsunetomo’s personal guards set out on horseback, Ken’ishi joined one of the groups on foot, searching the hills to the north and west.
Those on foot carried gongs and drums and shouted as they tramped through brown, waist-high grass, across terraced rice fields, through patches of forest, higher into the pine-swathed mountainsides and bamboo groves. Birds fled the clamor in cloud-like flocks. Ken’ishi sought a chance to speak to one of them, as Kaa had taught him to do as a boy. He wanted to ask for word of Hatsumi but could not get close enough. The dreary gray sky and close-hanging clouds created a sense of foreboding, and drained all sense of life from the land.
Snow began to fall in heavy, wet flakes, and the search went from dreary and exhausting to freezing and damp. At nightfall, they called off the hunt and returned to the castle.
Over the next two days, search parties scoured the countryside but returned to the castle empty-handed each night.
The pall that fell over the town and the castle dimmed the gaiety of the coming New Year festival. Preparations continued, but smiles were thin as people did their work to distract themselves from the worry about any terrible curse. Brightly colored banners, painted with images of koi and prayers and wishes for the coming year, fluttered from poles as usual, but many of the banners included talismans inscribed to ward off evil and protect people from harm.
The town shone with lights at night, and people walked the streets with wary expressions as if one of their neighbors could be suddenly possessed. Shinto and Buddhist priests collected offerings and filled the town with the scent of incense and the ringing of bells.
On the morning of New Year’s Day, a servant woman came into Barrack Six bearing a box of rice-paper packets for each of the men, a gift from the lady of the castle. Ken’ishi unwrapped his carefully, noting the elegant, feminine hand in which his name had been written on the scarlet ribbon. Inside he found three mochi cakes colored pink, green, and white. The men cheered the lady of the castle and devoured the cakes. Different flavors and colors of sweet bean paste filled each one.
And when his last cake was gone, Ken’ishi found, half-obscured by rice flour, meticulously written in tiny script on a slip of paper underneath, a poem:
The nightingale listens from her cage
At the Sanmon Gate
For footsteps at dusk
Caught between darkness and light
She calls,
“Will he come? Will he come?”
A bolt of simultaneous joy and suspicion shot through him. The words wormed into him, kicking his heart into a faster rhythm.
He crumpled the paper and tossed it into the brazier.
The coals licked orange along the crumpled edges, and fire bloomed and blackened.
He watched it burn until it was nothing but ash.
* * *
Ken’ishi thought about his dilemma. He could not meet Kazuko when he was appointed to retrieve Silver Crane. The sword polisher had said that he must come at the exact appointed time, or he would not find him.
But this could be his only chance to speak to Kazuko, ever. Warriors of his rank were not allowed to speak to ladies of hers. Any secret liaison invited discovery. If he failed to go to her, what then? And if he could speak to her, what would he say? That his heart had not been his own since the day they met?
He trusted no one else to retrieve Silver Crane from the sword polisher, nor could he send anyone in his place to meet Kazuko.
Besides, the Sanmon Gate at the temple and the shop of the sword polisher were on opposite sides of town. If he did not meet the sword polisher, he might never see Silver Crane again.
Around him, the men dispersed from the barracks to join the festival in the town, from which the sound of merrily beating drums echoed up to the castle.
Michizane sauntered up and said, “What say you, Ken’ishi? Let us join the merriment and forget our troubles until tomorrow.”
Ken’ishi acquiesced. The festival lay nearer both destinations anyhow. Together they walked into town to where brightly colored tents had been erected. Villagers pounded cooked rice into mochi with great, wooden hammers and hollowed out tree stumps as bowls. The streets were redolent with smells of roasting chestnuts, boiling seaweed, and roasting fish. Gongs and jangles rang and jounced. Knots of giggling children ran past. In spite of the gaiety, the kami still whispered to him of the tension in everyone’s hearts. Perhaps they sang and laughed a bit too boisterously. Perhaps they drank just a little too much.
A group of performers had gathered before the Roasted Acorn, jugglers and dancers and singers, collecting a large crowd of laughing onlookers. The performers were dressed in brightly colored clothes, some sewn with tattered rags that bounced and twirled as they moved.
One of the jugglers was a tall man with a hatchet-like nose, wearing a suit of fluttering, rainbow-like rags, who kept a veritable cloud of multi-colored balls arcing over his head. The Raggedy Man. Kaa, the tengu, in the same guise he had used to seduce Kiosé the previous year. How shocked Ken’ishi had been to discover them, soon after Hage had enchanted away her memories.
“What is it?” Michizane said. “Did something just bite you?”
Ken’ishi cleared the lump from his throat. “There’s someone I must speak to, right now. I’ll find you later.”
He hurriedly circled the crowd to where the Raggedy Man juggled for a pack of children, who squealed with laughter at his preposterous expressions and incredible dexterity. Before Ken’ishi could get close, however, the Raggedy Man turned his dark eyes upon him like spear points, and tracked Ken’ishi for several long, painful moments as he wormed through the crowd. The balls fell into the Raggedy Man’s hands. Then he bowed with exaggerated aplomb, turned, and disappeared into the gap between the Roasted Acorn and the paper-maker’s shop next door.
Ken’ishi circled the paper-maker’s shop at a run, hoping to catch the Raggedy Man in the alley behind.
But no one was there.
“Sensei!” Ken’ishi called. “Where are you?”
The reply was a burst of cheering from the street. The only other occupants of the alley were three chickens in a bamboo cage, huddled together against the cold. He tried to talk to the chickens, but they were all so terrified of human beings that they flung themselves into a squawking, feather-flapping frenzy until he sighed and moved on.
He searched the alley and finally gave up, returning to the street, where a man in a fearsome oni mask cavorted with a comically bulbous club. Initially, the crowd was hesitant to embrace his efforts, but he won them over with ribald songs whilst slapping his own backside.
Before long, the resonant tones of a great bell rang up and down the street, growing louder with each slow chime. Monotone chanting joined the sound of the bell as a group of thirty shaven-headed monks rounded a corner, carrying a large shrine on poles hefted on their shoulders. They chanted and rang the bell with a great, padded wooden clapper.
The crowds in
the street parted and bowed as they passed, hands pressed together in prayer. As one sutra came to a close, the abbot, riding upon the shrine as if it were a palanquin, extended his arms and then bowed his head in fervent prayer for all the buddhas and bodhisattvas to deliver the town from evil influences. By the time the shrine and its attendants passed, the crowd was already resuming its former boisterousness.
Michizane brought hot saké for each of them, which they drank straight from the jar.
“Is it possible to understand religion?” Ken’ishi asked Michizane. “All those gods and buddhas. It is so complicated.”
“This procession is meant to bless the town through the coming year. They will pass by here twice more before sunset.”
“That’s simple enough, I suppose....”
“If you want to know more, I’m not the man to ask,” Michizane said. “My father always said that the Shinto priests and the Buddhists are simply two sides of the same false coin. I’m with him.”
“You don’t believe in the kami?”
“I have never seen a kami, nor had a prayer answered to my satisfaction. The gods are either cruel or careless. I’ll have truck with neither.” Michizane took a drink. “You look as if you disagree.”
“I don’t know about gods and buddhas, but I know the kami to be real.”
“How?”
“They talk to me every day. And I talk to them.”
Michizane raised an eyebrow with a slight smirk. “And how do you manage that?”
“My teacher taught me how to listen for them when I was a boy. They are there, if you know how to listen.”
Michizane shrugged. “I’d rather listen to my wife’s sighs in my ear. I wish she were here.”
* * *
The clouds parted, allowing the sun to warm the festivities and turn the snow into slush. Amid flurries of giggles from village children, snowballs flew in random directions. Villagers danced and sang to the music of drums and gongs and flutes.
Spirit of the Ronin Page 10
