Black Arrow (46 page)

“She will have help. She will only tell Uesugi his future and leave a message with one of the servants. Koreburo will take care of everything else. He could set a small fire perhaps?”

Akitada considered the drawing again and nodded slowly. “Yes, it might work. A small conflagration with much smoke, easily put out. Just here, I think. Where the southern gallery makes a turn.” He pointed, then looked up. “Did you say Koreburo? Isn’t that the old man who used to play
go
with Hideo?”

Kaoru nodded. “He will be eager to help. He blames Makio and Kaibara for Hideo’s death.”

“Does he indeed? He did not say so to me.”

Kaoru shrugged. “He’s a strange old fellow, but he could have picked up something from the other servants. In any case, he can be trusted.”

Akitada gave the other man a long look, then nodded. “Very well. I will give detailed instructions to Takesuke before we meet. Meanwhile, you can make your arrangements.”

Kaoru rose and bowed. “You honor me with your confidence, sir. Allow me.” He stepped to the shutters and threw them open, letting in a gust of cold air. There was a full moon, fitfully revealed by dark clouds, but in the east the darkness grew faintly lighter. “It will be dawn in an hour. If I leave for my village immediately and carry my grandmother part of the way to Takata on my horse, Koreburo should be ready before the noon rice. Shall we meet below the manor at the start of the hour of the horse?”

“Yes.” Akitada came and looked at the driving clouds. “When will the great snow start? I have been expecting it for weeks.”

“Perhaps today, perhaps later.” Kaoru spoke with the indifference of a local man. “The snows will come in their own time.” He smiled suddenly. “It will still be possible to send the news to the capital that we have taken Takata.”

Akitada raised his brows but said only, “We will need a signal from inside the manor.”

“When all is ready, Koreburo will give the cry of the snow goose. If that is all, sir, I shall be on my way.”

After Kaoru had gone, Akitada stood for a few more moments at the open shutters. The idea of war was foreign to him. This day would decide life or death for many. Uesugi, Takesuke, and Kaoru, perhaps even the fate of an emperor along with that of an old servant who risked his life for the memory of a dead friend. His own also, and that of Tamako and their unborn child. There were no more choices, no options of escape. He had accepted this charge and offered up the lives of his family and his friends along with his own. Tamako’s warning about the letter to the capital came to his mind. Uesugi was not his only worry. Did any man have the right to gamble with the lives of others?

He sighed, hating this harsh northern land with its superstitions, its violence, its people’s predilection for secrets and plots.

There was a scratching at the door. He called, “Enter!” and closed the shutters. Oyoshi came in hesitantly.

“Do I disturb you, sir?”

“No. You are very welcome.” Afraid that his fears and self-doubts were written large on his face, Akitada was effusive, inviting Oyoshi to sit and pouring him a cup of tea.

Oyoshi looked strained, but Akitada’s fussing seemed to reassure him. “I have waited anxiously to speak to you since we found Mrs. Omeya’s body,” he said after a sip of tea. “You have been very busy, and this has been my first opportunity. How are things going, sir?”

“I will leave for Takata later today,” said Akitada, “to settle the Uesugi matter.”

“Oh, dear. Forgive me. I have chosen a bad time. Let me be brief then. I wish to resign my office as your coroner.”

“But why?” Akitada’s heart sank. He had expected something, but he pretended surprised shock.

Oyoshi smiled a little. “There is no need to spare my feelings, sir. Even before Mrs. Omeya’s death, I felt that you regretted my appointment. I made a foolish mistake with the mutilated body, and that certainly proved me incompetent. Since then, I’m afraid, there have been more serious suspicions. I won’t embarrass you or myself by asking what they are, but I wanted to tell you that I will leave as soon as you have found a replacement.”

Akitada sighed. “My friend,” he said, “and I hope I may still call you that—I have made many mistakes since I arrived. Perhaps some of my mistakes have cost lives and will cost more. Not the least of my mistakes was to doubt you. I should have known that a man who would risk his life to perform an illegal exhumation at my request would not at the same time plot against me.” He bowed to Oyoshi. “I apologize humbly for my foolishness.”

The doctor became so agitated that he spilled his tea. “Oh, no,” he cried. “Please don’t. You were quite right to suspect everyone, and who more than myself? What could you know about me, who had hidden his past from everyone? What should you think when I gave the wrong testimony in court? Why should you trust me when I was so conveniently on the premises when Mrs. Omeya was killed? You did quite right and have behaved with the greatest justice and patience towards me.”

“You will stay then?”

Oyoshi did not answer right away. He put down his teacup and wiped his fingers. “There is another thing. I killed someone,” he said softly. “I had a very bad moment when Tora said something about murderous doctors and looked at me in a very knowing way. May I tell you about it?”

Akitada said quickly, “There is no need. I am quite satisfied.”

“Allow me, sir. Many years ago, in another province, I served as personal physician to ... a powerful man. I caused my patient’s death after I discovered that my wife had spent more time in his bed than in mine. It was wrong to love her more than my duty.” He broke off and raised a hand to hide his face in shame.

“You were not found out?”

Oyoshi lowered his hand and smiled bleakly. “No. He was ill and I attended him. Once I was a very good physician. I could have saved his life, but I let him die. Afterwards I divorced my wife and left the area. I spent the next ten years traveling, working at fairs and treating the poor, earning a few coppers as a barber now and then to buy medicines. For another fifteen years after that I tried the religious life. I entered a monastery, but in the end the guilt would not leave me and it grated on my ears to be called a holy man. So I took to the road again and ended up here, where I hoped to end my life in obscurity.” He gave a hollow laugh and shook his head.

Akitada was relieved. “Legally you are not guilty of murder,” he said. “This will not prevent you from serving as coroner.”

“I must confess to yet another offense,” Oyoshi said sadly. “When I saw you at Takata, ill, outnumbered, outmanipulated, and surrounded by forces you seemed neither by background nor by personality equipped to handle, you seemed lost. Then, when you asked me to serve as your coroner, I formed the somewhat confused idea of throwing in my lot with you. Circumstances favored this, and the more I learned about you, the more convinced I became that joining your downfall would be my personal atonement. I planned to end my life with you and thus make amends for my past. But I was quite wrong. You have fought the evil in this province successfully and you will prevail, while I must continue to bear my guilt.”

For a moment Akitada was so taken aback by this that he did not know whether to laugh or be angry. Then he remembered the coming battle and said, “I suppose both my arrogance and my ignorance, obvious to everyone but me, blinded me to the local problems in the beginning. You were not wrong about me. I have little to be proud of, and had I known how badly I would bungle, I would have fled in panic. Let us hope that some good may still come of our most foolish actions. I want you to stay.”

Oyoshi brushed at his eyes. “If you truly wish it, sir,” he murmured. He rose awkwardly and stumbled from the room.

♦

Heavy gray clouds swirled above and sleet stung their faces. Below them, the forest enclosing the frozen fields looked funereal, like a black stole draped across a pallid hempen gown. It was past midday. Hours ago, Akitada and Takesuke had ridden up to the Takata gate and demanded Makio’s surrender. A hail of arrows had been their answer. After that, Takesuke had withdrawn his troops, and Akitada, along with Hitomaro and Tora, had gone to meet Kaoru.

The four would make the dangerous attempt to get inside the fortified manor. They wore straw rain capes over light armor and waited hidden among trees where they could see part of the road leading up to the manor. A quarter of the hour passed before the old woman appeared, walking slowly and leaning on the arm of a girl.

“Isn’t that your sister?” Hitomaro asked Kaoru. “Why risk her life?”

“My cousin. She usually goes along and I could not stop her.”

They waited again, nervously now, until the two women returned. The girl loosened the shawl around her head and let it blow in the wind for a moment before she retied it.

“Good girl! All is ready,” said Kaoru, adding grimly, “Let’s hope we do our part as well.”

Akitada looked up at the sky to gauge the time. There was no sun. The icy wind pushed angry gray clouds before it, clouds so low that they hid the snowy tops of the distant mountains. Wisps of cloud drifted across the dark roofs of Takata manor— shredded silk gauze from a mourner’s train.

They left the trees at a run and dashed across the road. Up the hill, still at a run, they kept mostly to a gully, a jagged scar which ran up the barren hillside. The gully gave them some cover, but then they were in the open again and close enough to the manor that a single archer on one of the galleries could pick them off one by one, like running deer.

As they ran uphill, the low clouds finally released the first heavy drops. They congealed into sleet in the cold wind and stung their faces. Akitada clasped his heavy sword to his side so it would not get between his legs and trip him. His armor was also heavy and cumbersome, and the rain-soaked straw cape flapped wetly against him. His breath soon came in hoarse gasps, his chest hurt, and his leg muscles ached, but he was ashamed to fall back behind the others. When they reached the steep outcropping under the eastern wall, he sagged against the rock, drenched in sweat despite the bitter cold.

They huddled there for a little, in a blind spot where an overhanging gallery hid them from watching eyes above, and waited for the signal. The icy wind cut through the straw coats and turned the metal scales of their armor into ice against their wet bodies. Akitada’s teeth chattered from cold and nerves.

Below the land stretched away, empty sere fields traversed by the darker line of the road. They had come from the forest to the north and followed a path so narrow and overgrown that only Kaoru had known how to find it. He had kept an eye on the ramparts above them, but they had seen no watchers. Takesuke and his men were on the other side, below the approach to the manor’s gate, and that was where Uesugi expected the attack to come from.

Here immense slabs of rock rose to an outer wall and to the black timbers of a gallery jutting into the stormy gray sky above them. Dry shrubs and stunted trees grew from cracks in the rocks. Kaoru moved along the path to one of the slabs of rock and felt it. He grunted and gave a push, and Akitada saw a crack widen into a thin black fissure.

Like the tomb entrance, Akitada thought with a shiver. He said aloud, “What about the signal?”

Kaoru nodded. “We wait a little longer, but there isn’t much time left.”

So they stood, shivering in the sleeting rain with their sword grips freezing to their perspiring palms, wondering if Koreburo had been caught. Akitada heard distant drumbeats carried on the wind in snatches. Takesuke was following instructions and exercising his troops. Akitada wished himself a common foot soldier, trotting briskly and unencumbered by heavy armor to the command of an officer. He was impatient to get this over with, to confront what lay in wait behind the stone door. Action, any kind of action, was preferable to this agonizing process of congealing in the freezing blasts.

When it finally came, that cry of the snow goose, once, and quickly again, they exchanged glances, then tossed off their straw wraps and gripped their swords more tightly. Kaoru and Tora together pushed the stone aside. A dark and narrow stone stairway ascended inside.

Suddenly, before Kaoru could take the lead, Hitomaro pushed past Akitada and disappeared into the darkness. Tora muttered a curse, and Akitada drew his sword and went after Hitomaro into the murky shaft leading upward. Hitomaro’s rapid steps sounded ahead, but it was too dark to see. What was the fool doing? At any moment he might run into danger and give them away. More steps shuffled behind, but Akitada was bent on catching up with Hitomaro.