Lord Oda's Revenge
Read Lord Oda's Revenge Online
Authors: Nick Lake
LORD ODA
'
S REVENGE
N
ICK
L
AKE
is an editorial director at HarperCollins Children's Books. He received his degree in English from Oxford University.
Blood Ninja
and
Lord Oda's Revenge
were inspired by his interest in the Far East, and by the fact that he is secretly a vampire ninja himself. Nick lives with his wife in Oxfordshire, protected by booby traps, poisoned darts and a fat, lazy tom cat, but why not pay him a visit on Facebook?
BLOOD NINJA
THE SECRET MINISTRY OF FROST
LORD ODA
'
S
REVENGE
First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, 10020.
First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Nick Lake, 2010
The moral right of Nick Lake to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 184887 389 6
eBook ISBN: 978 184887 391 9
Printed in Great Britain
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26â27 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ
For my mother.
Thank you for teaching me to read.
LORD ODA
'
S REVENGE
The Portuguese Port Town Of Nagasaki, Japan
1566
I
T WAS NIGNT
It always had to be night.
The blind man traced his fingertips along the wooden wall of the warehouse, inching his way towards the door. He could smell the sea now, a sharp tang of seaweed and brine everywhere around him, as if the ocean were extending its fiefdom into the very air. It was raining heavily â the blind man could hear the drops pattering on the water, to his left.
The warehouse was longer than he had expected. It seemed he had been walking its length all evening. But then it had to be large. This was where the
nanban
â the barbarians from the south â stored the goods they brought over from China in their enormous, fat-bellied ships: silk, silver, china tableware.
And guns.
âWhat do you see?' he asked the boy, Jun, who was walking before him.
âThere is a barbarian ship at anchor. The lamp on the tallest mast is lit, but I can't see any sailors.'
âGood. And the warehouse door?'
âAhead, I think. There's a patch of darker shadow.'
The blind man nodded. âLead me.'
Jun took his hand â the blind man felt him shiver at the contact with the scarred, rough flesh â and the boy pulled him gently forward. They walked quietly, cloth slippers on their feet. The shadows concealed them from sight, and the pattering of the rain deadened the soft sound of their passing.
A perfect night for their work.
Jun stopped, and the blind man reached out in front of him, running his hands over the door, its hinges, its metal handle in the barbarian style. Then he frowned. Where the door should have met the jamb, there was a narrow space â a vertical fissure running parallel to the wall.
The door was open.
The blind man held his breath, while motioning for Jun to stay still. Between himself and the boy, they had set up everything â learning when the sailors would be drinking belowdecks, bribing the guard to meet them here at the side entrance to the warehouse. Then the blind man would knock him unconscious, and take the guns before they could be smuggled up-country and into the possession of one of the wrong lords.
âOpen the door very slowly,' he whispered to Jun. âTell me what you see.'
There was a light creaking sound. âA table,' said Jun, under his breath. âThere's a kind of red meat on a plate, half-eaten. And a glass of blood.'
âBeef and wine,' said the blind man. âNot blood.' He knew that the barbarians ate cow, which they called waca, after the Portuguese name for that gentle animal, and that they drank a red alcohol made from grapes. He'd also heard that they drank this wine in their churches, saying that it was the blood of their god, though he was not sure whether this was only one of the more hysterical rumours about the worshippers of kirishta.
âAnything else?' he whispered.
âNext to the table is a long case on the ground. It has been smashed open.'
âIs there anything inside?'
âNo. It's empty. And there'sâ' An intake of breath. âThere's something on the ground. It could be wine, or. . .'
Blood.
He heard Jun stoop and pick something up from the floor. Then a heavy, cold object was placed in his hands. He turned it over, seeing it with his touch. A long bar, with two prongs jutting from either side.
A cross.
The blind man had seen these things, before his eyes were burned out. The
kirishitan
barbarians worshipped the symbol, saying that it was on such a cross that their god was nailed to die. The blind man thought it was strange to kneel down before the thing that killed your god â but he supposed that if you could eat the flesh of the cow, which the Buddha had declared holy, and you could drink blood in your churches, then celebrating your god's death was nothing.
Not that he could reproach them, of course, when it came to drinking blood.
The blind man slipped the cross into a pocket sewed inside his kimono. There was a chain attached to the upper end of it, and he supposed that it had until recently hung around someone's neck. The guard's, perhaps. Something had happened here, and now the guns were almost certainly gone.
He cursed quietly. âWe should go,' he whispered to Jun. Someone else had heard about the guns, it seemed. Someone had come and killed the guard, or taken him away, and then they had stolen the precious merchandise.
He was irritated, but not surprised. As soon as he himself had heard the rumour, he had made his way south. The Portuguese had brought a new kind of gun in their latest shipment, it was said â one that used a spark created by a wheel of metal to ignite the powder, not a fuse, and could consequently be fired reliably in the rain. The blind man knew that many of the daimyos already had guns â Lord Oda was said to have constructed thousands of them on the original Portuguese model, and even trained regiments of his samurai to use them in battle. But they were long as spears, unwieldy, and made useless if the weather was wet.
The blind man had fought battles before and was familiar with the violent simplicity of the art of war. To possess weapons that could be disabled by the weather was not a good strategy. But to be the only one with weapons unaffected by the elements? That was worth killing for.
As he followed Jun back the way they had come, his fingertips stroking the wooden wall, he wondered who could have done it, who could have gone there before him. Oda was dead â killed in his own tower. It could have been Sumitada, perhaps, who had converted to the
kirishitan
religion and called himself Bartoromeo now. It was Sumitada who had given Nagasaki to the barbarians, receiving in return the first choice of silk, which had not been seen in Japan since the Chinese stopped sending it direct, protesting against the Japanese
wako
pirates who preyed on their ships.