Year of the Demon (58 page)

“He was said to have a rider with him. A
ronin
of some years.”

“No,” said Shichio. His spies on the Tokaido had reported that Daigoro and his haggard bodyguard had split ways at least a week past. His agent within the Wind said the boy had been alone when he hired his retinue to spirit him to Izu.

But this was not the first fantastic tale to have reached Shichio’s ears. Just this very morning a skiff had come alongside Hashiba’s flagship, delivering word that the Bear Cub had stolen a frigate after slaughtering the entire crew. It was preposterous, of course. Yes, the Okumas were a coastal power, but the boy was a cripple, not a seaman, and each of Shichio’s vessels was teeming with armed men. The whelp would need an army of pirates at his command. The tale was so ludicrous that Shichio had ordered a broadside into the skiff that delivered the message. He would have sunk the bastards for their cheek had Hashiba not heard the sudden cannonade and ordered a cease-fire.

Out of sheer magnanimity Shichio chose not to kill this messenger either. “The Yasuda garrison is playing tricks on you,” he told the kneeling man. “They take advantage of your gullibility.”

“My lord, they were most explicit: a young boy with an
odachi
and a lame leg—”

“Quit while you still have a tongue in your mouth.” Shichio had a sudden vision of blood oozing from the messenger’s mouth, and he realized his fingers had worked their way under the folds of Chinese silk. He was touching the mask.

He withdrew his hand as if the mask had bitten it. Hashiba frowned at him but said nothing. Shichio banged on the roof and the stinking, sweating bearers resumed their march.

When he reached the gate, Shichio was pleased by what he saw. House Okuma commanded a grand vista. Katto-ji, home to the abbot he was soon to kill, peered out from the pines on the next summit to the north. Below, on the saddle between the peaks, a double garrison was camped along the road flying Toyotomi colors. That road and the jetty were the only ways to reach the Okuma compound. Rumors be damned, Shichio thought. He would believe his eyes before he believed tales of captured frigates and samurai heroics, and his eyes saw no corpses lining the road, nor any pirate vessels anchored in the bay.

Just inside the gates, Okuma warriors formed columns of red and brown, their bear paw crests fluttering overhead on their banners. Opposite them stood a wall of soldiers in mossy green, with a fat white centipede winding its way up the length of each green banner. He remembered that crest from his intelligence reports: House Yasuda. He wondered how low a clan had to sink before it took a wriggling insect as its sigil.

In the center stood his bride, the Lady Yumiko, cradling an infant. Shichio remembered hearing the Bear Cub’s wife was with child. That wedding must have been rushed along by spearheads if the cub’s child was already born. Again exercising his generosity, Shichio decided he would let his new bride coddle her grandson for a few minutes before ordering the wedding to commence. He was happy to see the woman sober enough to stand. If even half of the rumors that reached him were true, she spent her days either sedated by poppy’s tears or wailing and running about like a hungry ghost.

The primary reason Shichio had cajoled Hashiba into coming with him was not to have his friend, lord, and lover by his side on his wedding day, but to guarantee that the wedding would take place. The matron of House Okuma had yet to respond to a single one of Shichio’s marriage proposals, and he needed a contingency plan if she chose to remain mute when her would-be husband arrived. That was where Hashiba came in: he could simply order her to marry Shichio. But seeing Lady Yumiko in her bridal dress, with her attendants and even the attendants of neighboring houses arrayed to honor the occasion, Shichio could see her will had finally caved.

“My lord regent,” he heard a familiar voice say, “and General Shichio too, what a pleasant surprise! You honor House Okuma with your attendance.”

Shichio stepped out of the palanquin and looked over the top of it. There stood the Bear Cub’s tall, lean bodyguard, the one with the bushy sideburns and tousled paintbrush of a topknot—Katsuhara, Shichio thought his name was, or Katsushira, something like that. He stood just inside the Okuma gate, looking tired and gray and not at all like a proper attendee at a wedding. Shichio expected no more of the man; he’d always struck Shichio as common.

“Why, we’re just as surprised to see you, aren’t we?” Shichio said. He set the mask in the palanquin; shabby though he was, the
ronin
was dangerous, and Shichio needed to keep his wits. “Word reached me that you abandoned your little cub in his hour of need—and now here you are at his homestead. Fickle, aren’t you? One who lacked manners might ask whether you had impure designs on the boy’s mother.”

“His designs on my mother are pure enough,” said the voice Shichio hated most in the world.

The Bear Cub stepped out from the midst of the Okuma column, pallid as a corpse but somehow still standing. It was impossible. Every path to the compound was under watch. But there he was, with that long and lovely sword slung across his back. Its
tsuba
and pommel glittered in the morning sun.

The boy bowed deeply, and Shichio responded with the slightest dip of his chin. “I bow to your superior,” the Bear Cub said, and Shichio turned back around to see Hashiba had hopped out of the palanquin.

“Ah!” said Hashiba, marching around so that he could see the gathering; he was too short to see over the palanquin. “An honor guard after all! I was beginning to think you’d lost your manners, Daigoro-san.”

“The honor guard is my mother’s,” said that odious voice, “and she and I beg your pardon alike. We did not know you were coming, my lord regent.”

“Forget it,” Hashiba said, waving his hand as if shooing off a butterfly. He inhaled deeply, flaring the nostrils in his too-flat nose, and clapped his hands against his breastplate with a grandiose and flippant air. “Smell that breeze from the sea! So different from Kyoto.”

Daigoro stepped forward to usher Hashiba inside the compound. Shichio noticed the boy’s limp was much more pronounced than he’d seen before. “Why, young Daigoro,” he said. “You seem to be limping more than usual, my lad. Is your infirmity growing worse?”

“I took a wound to the leg last night.”

“Ah, yes. Getting out of bed, was it? What a trial it must be, being unable to do all the things the rest of us take for granted.”

“It was a sword wound,” said the whelp, grinding his teeth.

“Was it indeed? Can the rumors of your assault on the Yasuda compound be true? Do tell me who cut you; I shall have to decide whether to promote him or to chastise him for not cutting deeper.”

“You needn’t burden yourself with such difficult decisions. He’s dead now.”

“Is he?” Shichio found himself unable to keep the glee from his voice. It caused the boy such obvious pain simply to be standing on his own two feet. He so plainly wanted to rest that Shichio resolved to keep him standing and talking for as long as possible. Taunting him was just a garnish on a plate that was already beautifully overfull. “I shall add his murder to the list of charges against you.”

“Why stop with one murder?” said the whelp. “Make it fifty.”

“Fifty? That’s the second time I’ve heard that number,
neh
? Yes, it is. You’ve become quite the little brigand, haven’t you? Perhaps the lord regent and I should have you crucified now, and get to the wedding later.”

Shichio saw Hashiba’s eyes light up at the mention of crucifixion, but on the face of that despicable boy he saw an insufferable little smile—a tiny thing, so small it was barely there, yet it seemed to hold back a torrent of derisive laughter. Shichio had seen that smile many times as a child, stabbing at him like a dagger from the faces of countless village boys, and in fact he’d made a point of riding in the vanguard when, during the bitterest of the war years, he and Hashiba demolished the tiny hamlet where Shichio had grown up. Seeing that wicked, happy smile on the face of the Bear Cub was more than he could stomach.

“That’s quite enough,” he said, striding angrily across the road until he stood chest to chest with the boy. Daigoro stood just inside the threshold of the Okuma compound, Shichio just outside of it, each one matching the other’s stare. “I’ll string you up on the gates of your own house,” he said, his voice so low that only the Bear Cub could hear him. “Your wife, your child, your servants, they’ll walk past you for
days.
I’ll nail your bones to the wood. I’ll have you fed and watered, keep you alive for as long as I can. And then, right before you die, I’ll kill your mother—my
wife
—right in front of you. I’ll flay her with your own sword. Your wife too, and then your little boy. And then I’ll drive that big sword of yours right through your—”

“My little boy?”

Shichio’s heart pounded in his ears. A sweat broke out on his upper lip. “Yes, your boy, you little runt, that newborn son of yours. He’s going to—”

“That’s not my son.”

“What?”

There was that smile again, that smallest, sharpest, wickedest of grins.

•   •   •

“That’s not my son,” Daigoro said again, desperately restraining a triumphant laugh. He’d never seen anyone look so baffled while trying to look malicious before. He wished he had a mirror, so Shichio could see what it looked like.

“My lords,” he said, taking a step back into his family’s courtyard—a step away from Shichio and toward Hideyoshi. “Your presence on this wedding day honors us all. Please accept my heartfelt thanks, and allow me to thank you on behalf of House Okuma as well.”

“Thanks? Honor?” Shichio spat the words. “Of course I’m here. It’s
my
wedding. You’re the one who shouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, because of your garrison? You may want to have words with them. It seems they don’t know about all the little lanes we’ve got crisscrossing the estate.”

“What?”

“Of course,” Daigoro said, enjoying himself every bit as much as Shichio had been a few moments before. “Connecting the orchard, the bathhouse, that sort of thing. You’ll understand when you have property of your own.”

“This
is
my property—or it will be, as soon as you step aside and let me get on with my wedding.”

“I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding. Unless . . . did you bring a bride of your own? I’m afraid all the ladies present are already married.”

“I’m here to marry your mother, you impudent little cur, and you know that damn well.”

“But my mother’s already got a husband,” Daigoro said. “Allow me to present to you the newly married Lord and Lady Yasuda.”

He stretched out his arm as grandly as Hideyoshi might have done it, and from the heart of the assembly his mother walked forward, positively glowing. Her steps were tiny—a bridal kimono did not allow the legs much movement—and so it took a delightfully long time for her to approach. Shichio fumed all the while. “This,” Daigoro said, touching his mother’s silken shoulder, “is Lady Yasuda Yumiko, and this”—he gingerly took the baby in his green swaddling clothes from his mother’s arms—“is Lord Yasuda Gorobei, her new husband.”

Shichio opened his mouth to speak; only a strangulated gurgle came out. Daigoro’s mother blushed and looked with adoration and pride at her son, then at her rosy-cheeked husband in the crook of Daigoro’s arm. Hideyoshi let out a howl, laughing so hard he had to cling to a bodyguard’s shoulder to stay standing.

“We have
got
to come here more often,” Hideyoshi said. “You bastards are a riot.”

The little Lord Yasuda replied with a yawn, scrunched his eyes tight against the morning sun, and nestled himself deeper into Daigoro’s kimono. He had no more hair than his great-grandfather, Yasuda Jinbei, whose compound Daigoro had just departed some scant hours before. Whatever Hideyoshi had to say next was choked off by another fit of cackling, which he tried to restrain out of respect for the baby’s sleep. Shichio nearly choked too; apoplexy still had the better of him.

Daigoro decided to make the most of the opportunity. “Mother,” he said softly, “how are you feeling?”

“Better, now that we have you home.” She smiled at him, though he winced at the word
home
. Her face glowed with a radiance he hadn’t seen in her in more than a year. She stroked baby Gorobei’s fat cheek with the back of a finger. “What a beautiful little husband you found for me.”

“I had hoped to speak of it with you first,” Daigoro said. “It was not my intent to marry you off without your consent. This was the only way I could think of to—”

“It’s fine, Daigoro. It was very clever of you, in fact—a much better solution than that horrid letter we got from you. I’m your mother and Akiko is your wife, regardless of what you write in any official decrees.”

Daigoro felt his face flush. “I promise we’ll have a talk about that—but later, if you don’t mind. Do you know where Aki is?”

“I’m here,” Akiko said, wending her way through the armored ranks of Okuma warriors. She wore ruby red silk, her face pale and inscrutable. It was the first time he’d laid eyes on his wife since departing for Kyoto, for though he’d reached the Okuma estate in the earliest hours of the morning, there had been distractions of every kind: introductions to be made, wounds to clean and bind, to say nothing of the hastiest wedding preparations in history. On top of all that, morning sickness had invaded Akiko’s stomach like the Mongol hordes, waking her each day with a new incursion and showing no signs of decamping.

As such, Daigoro’s first thought was to attribute her pallor to nausea. But then she narrowed her eyes at him, her shoulders stiffened, and Daigoro feared he’d angered her. But of course, his conscience said. Running off without so much as a farewell, disappearing for nearly a month—one-third of their entire marriage—sending a decree almost as soon as he was out the door, declaring that he’d disowned her; what was she supposed to do? Welcome him with open arms? Had she even read the accompanying letter, the one that explained his decision and explained how much it pained him? Or had she pitched it into the fire pit? Torn it up? Tossed the scraps into the wind?