Daughter of the Sword (35 page)

With startling speed the body burned to nothing. Daigoro watched side by side with his mother, her shoulder trembling under his hand as she wept. He could not be seen to cry in front of his bannermen and their samurai, so he squeezed her shoulder and meditated on impermanence. It seemed impossible that someone so vibrantly alive as Ichirō could simply cease to exist, but at the same time it seemed that in the blink of an eye there burned wood and nothing else.

When it was done, Ichirō’s ashes were committed in the shrine built to honor their father a few short months before. Leaving the shrine, Daigoro saw Yasuda Jinbei waiting for him, his thin topknot the same color as the snow in the courtyard.

“Lord Yasuda,” he said, bowing to the small man, “I noticed your grandnephew Eijun among your bodyguard. He honors my brother by coming.”

“He honors you, Okuma-dono.”

“He honors us both—as do you, Yasuda-san. Your family does a noble thing in forgiving my brother’s rudeness in his duel with Eijun-san. I thank you for it.”

Yasuda bowed his head. “There is nothing more to forgive, my lord. If I may say so, I fear your brother has paid the price for his rudeness. I do not ordinarily listen to rumormongers, but I have heard that his behavior in his duel with young Eijun was not unique.”

“As direct as ever, Yasuda-san,” Daigoro said.

“An old man cannot afford to waste time getting to the point.” Yasuda bowed. “I have also heard that you fought with bravery and cunning to defend your family’s honor. They say your father’s skill lives on in you.”

“I doubt it. He fought in many wars; I have only the one duel to my name.”

“I had in mind his skill as a diplomat as well as his skill with the sword. If I may ask, what became of the one you killed, my lord?”

“I called for him to be cremated, and for his remains to be returned to House Ōda. I also ordered a small portion of his ashes to remain at the Ashigara checkpoint, to be interred where he fell. Tomorrow some of Ichirō’s ashes will be sent there as well, to be laid to rest in the same grave.”

Yasuda smiled. “A gesture worthy of your father,” he said.

“It is more than a gesture. I had no time to compose a death poem for Ōda, and so he and my brother will have to share one. I will have it etched on the stupa marking where they lie.”

“May I trouble you for the poem, my lord?”

Daigoro felt his cheeks warm. He’d spent more time than most as a scholar—his leg had never left him much choice—but even so he’d never considered himself a poet. Nevertheless, he withdrew the folded white rectangle from his overrobe and handed it to Lord Yasuda. It read,

Stones cannot climb up;
A boar will never back down.
Some can only fall.

“I’m afraid I’m not much of a writer,” said Daigoro.

Yasuda bowed deeply. “On the contrary, my lord. A testament to the folly of pride befits both men—yet as you’ve put it, they also have their merits. Boars are fearsome; stones are hard. You do them both honor, Okuma-dono.”

Daigoro and Yasuda walked slowly across the courtyard, snow crunching under their feet. They walked in silence, away from the main hall where the other guests had gathered. Under the eaves of a storehouse, the two men, both lords of their houses, watched the snow gathering on the rooftops.

BOOK SEVEN

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010 CE)

51

On her way out of the station Mariko passed an orange-haired boy in snow-bunny boots passing out packets of tissues to everyone who passed him by, an ad for Mitsui Sumitomo Bank slipped into each plastic-wrapped packet. Mariko took one of the packets herself as she passed, not because she needed it but because she was cruising on autopilot, lost in thought.

Kenjutsu
practice promised to be good for her tonight. She needed to take her mind off the rest of her life, every aspect of which was marred by failure. Picking up a sword was sure to bring her even more failures, but somehow those seemed small and transitory compared to everything else. There was still no sign of Saori, still no sign of Fuchida, still no hope of her calming her mother, still no hope that Ko would be anything other than an insufferable prick.

Mariko slipped through the shoppers milling about in front of all the little shops lining the sidewalk: booksellers, greengrocers, smartphone dealers, a rice shop, a punk used clothing store. Smells of fish and salt water assaulted her as she passed a little fishmonger’s tank of live crabs. Red snapper were laid out like playing cards, gaping at her from their beds of crushed ice, their glossy eyes lifeless. The crabs skittered at the smooth glass panes in their black armor, trying to climb the walls and free themselves from their prison. Even in their tiny
crustacean minds, surely they could see it was hopeless. Mariko sympathized. Hopelessness was all too familiar a feeling.

She wondered where Saori was, and whether she was sober, and why she herself would harbor even one second of hope that Saori might be sober during one of her disappearances. She wondered whether Fuchida felt the need to kill like Saori felt the need to use. Perversely, Mariko understood Fuchida’s behavior better than Saori’s. Getting mad enough to kill someone, or greedy enough, or jealous enough, or vengeful enough—that wasn’t hard to imagine. Knowing a thing was poisonous, more poisonous to you than to most other people, and then needing to go find that thing and smoke it or snort it or inject it—that was beyond Mariko’s ken.

But all such thoughts vanished once she got the huge Inazuma blade in her hands. All her hopelessness and self-doubt disappeared too. There was no room for them. Yamada faced her with a meter-long razor blade; she could not afford a moment’s inattention.

Tonight’s exercise was especially dangerous—a hell of a lot more dangerous than the TMPD’s aikido course, and people broke wrists and elbows in there all the time. “Sensei,” she said, nervously shifting her grip on her weapon, “are you sure we should be doing this?”

“Nothing sharpens the mind like live steel.”

“I know, but…didn’t you tell me once that only experts train with real swords? I’d feel a lot safer using one of those wooden
bokken
you told me about.”

He clucked his tongue at her. “The purpose of the
bokken
is to simulate live steel. Nothing can simulate Glorious Victory Unsought. Never forget: this is a sword unlike any other. The only way to learn to fight with it is to train with it.”

Mariko could appreciate that. The same went for the aikido and judo she’d learned at academy: practice was all fine and good, but the only way to know it worked was to do it for real. But risking a broken wrist was one thing; with Yamada’s exercises she felt like she was risking death.

They started by exchanging overhead strikes, stopping each blow a hand’s breadth from the other’s scalp. Glorious Victory Unsought was too heavy for Mariko, so she pulled her strikes early, but more than once she felt Yamada’s blade part her hair, stopping just millimeters from her skin.

This was only the warm-up, an attack drill to prepare her for learning a defense against it. Yamada had yet to teach her to block or sidestep; for him, defense meant chopping the opponent’s hands off before he could land a blow. They practiced just that. One of them would strike to the head; the other would anticipate the blow and counter to the wrists. As before, she tried to stop her counterstrikes a good ten or fifteen centimeters away from her target, but still, Mariko found the exercise terrifying—terrifying, yet thrilling too. Mariko knew she was too easily bored—it was a major reason driving her to join the TMPD—but this time she wondered whether there was such a thing as too much excitement.

They started slow, but soon Yamada pushed her to attack and defend at close to full speed. She wondered how his eyes could find her. It was dark, and not much moonlight reached his backyard. If his accuracy was even slightly off, he would chop off both her hands, or else cleave her skull right down the middle. What must it be like, she thought, to have practiced something ten thousand times? That was the number Yamada used whenever Mariko complained of something being too hard: “Do it ten thousand times and it will not seem difficult.” The Americans had a saying for someone like Yamada, someone whose skill had attained such a peak:
He could do it blindfolded
. In Yamada’s case that might literally have been true. But the Japanese had a saying too:
Even monkeys fall from trees
.

Mariko found the exercises taxed her concentration every bit as much as they taxed her muscles. After two hours of drilling, her body and her mind were equally exhausted. She had enough energy to sheathe her weapon and lay it down respectfully; then she collapsed on the lawn. “That was a good one, Sensei.”

“Yes. Your
shomen
strikes are coming along nicely.”

He sat on his bench and Mariko pushed herself up to her knees. She found kneeling easiest on her ribs, whose pain had subsided to a persistent dull ache. She’d finally gotten around to getting X-rays the day before, and they showed two hairline fractures. The hospital had given her a rib brace to wear, but she found it interfered with her sword work, so it was sitting in the house rolled up next to her purse. So, ignoring that nagging ache in her side, Mariko cleaned flecks of grass from her weapon just as Yamada had showed her, then used the wrist stretches he’d taught her. A satisfying sort of pain ran in lines from palm to elbow.

“Will you tell me about Glorious Victory Unsought?”

“Hm. I was wondering when you would ask about that again.”

“Well?”

Yamada set aside his own sword, then picked up Mariko’s. “This is Master Inazuma’s last weapon. His greatest, we are told. It is said that by the end he wished he had become a potter of teacups, not a sword smith. He could not bear the thought that his handiwork had ended so many lives. And yet he lived in an age when the world was carved into being by the sword. Battle was necessary, do you see? It was not like today, when average men and women can expect to go their whole lives without seeing warfare. You have seen violence, Oshiro-san, but you have not seen war. Believe me when I tell you your generation is the better for it.”

His voice carried a somber note she had not heard from him before. His eyes seemed to look through her and into the past itself, and they were saddened by what they saw there.

Obviously he was old enough to have served in the Second World War. What had he done there? Mariko couldn’t believe she’d never asked him. She thought of him as a friend now, a mentor, even a grandfather. She valued their training time so much that they never got around to talking about personal things, and of course personal talk was something Mariko was all too ready to avoid anyway, but
with Yamada she felt safe to lower her guard. She resolved to take him to dinner one of these nights, maybe as soon as his case was over, so they could share the things that granddaughters and grandfathers shared.

Yamada was silent for a long moment before he continued. “Master Inazuma understood the inevitability of warfare, but he had no love of it. This blade was forged out of that contradiction. It brings glory and victory, yes, but only to the warrior who does not seek them. How many braggarts and warmongers have tried to carve out a place for themselves in history with this sword? We can never know. Every last one of them was laid low, betrayed by his own weapon.”

“Just like Fuchida’s Beautiful Singer,” Mariko mused.

“Not
just
like it. Beautiful Singer is a jealous sword. She allows her wielder no love apart from her, and she will ruin any man who pretends to own her. Glorious Victory only threatens those who love combat more than peace.”

Mariko frowned at that. She wasn’t sure she was innocent on that count herself. Why choose police work if she wanted a life of peace? Why choose police work in Japan, knowing full well how much easier life was for female officers back in the States? And why the TMPD, the most elite department in the country, with the stiffest competition? Mariko had always told herself she’d done it to make her father proud, but there was an easier answer to all the questions: she was spoiling for a fight, plain and simple, and she always sought out the best place to get into one.

In that way she wasn’t so different from Saori. Self-abuse took many forms. Joining the TMPD wasn’t like smoking crystal meth, but both had their risks, and the Oshiro girls had each picked their poison.

Thoughts of poison and of Saori made a sudden connection with Fuchida in her mind. Saori poisoned herself knowing it was bad for her. Wasn’t Fuchida doing the same thing?

“Sensei, did you ever tell Fuchida your stories about the swords?”

“Of course. He was my protégé.”

“Does he believe in cursed swords?”

Yamada snorted. “Still such disdain, Inspector? You say it as if we were talking about ghosts or
kappa
or some such. Believing in the curse of Beautiful Singer requires no more faith than believing in stars. I cannot see them anymore, but there is more than enough written of them to make me a believer.”