Disciple of the Wind (44 page)

Oda’s face grew red. The tendons and veins in his neck stood out. The way he pursed his mouth, he looked angry enough to spit. “Ask, then.”

“Are you any relation to Oda Nobunaga?”

“Of course. The Odas and Odas are cousins. Our branch is the more storied lineage, I’ll have you know—or at least it was, until that sadist Nobunaga chopped his way into power.”

“There is a woman I must reach out to. She was a friend to . . . to the sadist Nobunaga. She said I could make contact with her through her allies with House Oda.”

“Ah. And you believe I am one of these allies?”

“I don’t know. But I think you must know someone who is. He was powerful here. So were you.”

Oda wiped his hand over his mouth. Daigoro could hear his whiskers scraping against the pads of his fingers. “This woman you want to reach, is her name Nene by any chance?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are a fool. What business could the Lady in the North possibly have with a half-dead, homeless, crippled, bloodthirsty
ronin
?”

Daigoro did not rise to the bait. Clearly Lord Oda still wanted to die. There was no other reason to insult an armed man so brashly. “Our business is our own,” he said flatly.

“
Our
business? Talk to her often, do you?”

“These days more often than usual.” That much was not a lie. Clearly it impressed Oda; it wiped the smirk off his face.

“I see,” Oda said gravely. “So this is the favor you would ask of me? To send word to Lady Nene?”

“Yes. Most importantly, I want your sworn word that no one else will intercept the message.”

Now the smirk came back. “Don’t be an ass. These are troubled times. War is afoot. Who can guarantee that a messenger should find his way through unmolested?”

“You can and you will. Carry the message yourself if you must.”

Drawing himself up to his full height, Oda sneered. Daigoro could see where Yoshitomo’s swagger had come from. “So now I’ve become your pageboy, eh? But you’ve told me too much, Daigoro. Someone wants to read your letters. Perhaps this someone wants to know where you are. Are you a hunted man, Daigoro?”

“You are enjoying yourself entirely too much, sir. I can only hope you will do your duty just as gladly.”

Another sneer. “And what duty would that be?”

“I will hand you a letter. You will deliver it or die in the attempt.
Bushido
asks no less of you.”

“Bah! Are you my liege lord? No. You came here in a wheelbarrow. That brigand Katsushima could have delivered a load of manure the
same way. Why should I give a moment’s thought to you and your oh-so-important message?”

In an act of surpassing generosity, Daigoro did not cut him in half. Instead, in a low, measured voice, he said, “If I were to set fire to your house, it would be my duty to put it out,
neh
?”

“Do you threaten me, boy?”

Daigoro ignored the question. “Suppose the house burned down. Would you agree that it is my duty to build you a new one?”

“Yes. What of it?”

“Suppose it were not me, but rather my son who burned your house down. Whose duty is it to rebuild it for you?”

Oda grumbled and steamed. “Whatever your point is, please make it soon.”

“You cannot begin to imagine all of the things your son cost my family when he killed Ichiro. If he had simply burned our house to the ground, he would have done less damage. And if that were all he had done, my lord, you would not have to be samurai to recognize your duty to set matters right. Even merchants and yakuzas teach their sons as much: if the child will not atone for his wrongs, then his parents must do it for him. Without that bond of shame, our society would fall apart.”

“So what if it would?”

“Your son owes my family a devastating debt. In repayment I ask you the simplest favor. I could demand that you beggar your own clan to build a new house for mine. Instead I only ask you to carry a letter to someone, and to let no one read it but her. If you will not do that, are you even worthy of the name ‘samurai’? Or are you just a coward with a topknot?”

Daigoro’s words stung Oda like wasps. Daigoro could see him flinch. Lord Oda did not care to hear about his son’s offenses, nor of the debt he’d incurred. He certainly didn’t care to suffer an assault to his honor as a samurai. But the reason he felt the words sting was that they were envenomed with truth.

“Your letter,” Oda said, his eyes vacant. He seemed to be speaking to a ghost. “Your letter . . .”

He returned to the shrine and uprooted a weather-beaten stele that stood next to his wife’s. Watching him tug at it reminded Daigoro of pulling a sword out of a dying man’s belly. The ground seemed to cling to the wooden stele, just as a body clutched jealously to the weapon that pierced it. At last he pulled it free and handed it to Daigoro.

Daigoro could barely make out the writing on its dried, grayed face. Yoshitomo no Mikoto, it read. It was his son’s grave marker. Below his name ran a haiku:

Stones cannot climb up;

A boar will never back down.

Some can only fall.

“Do you recognize the poem?” said Oda.

“Of course.” Daigoro hadn’t thought about those lines for a long time. Reading them now made him blink back tears. “I . . . I wrote it for your son and my brother. It was their death poem.”

Oda closed his eyes and swallowed. “You wrote it in a letter too, the one that accompanied Yoshitomo when you sent him home with his swords. Is it true that you engraved it on a stupa to hallow where they fell?”

“I did.”

“Do you remember how you closed that letter?” Daigoro thought about it a moment and had to confess he did not. “You invited us to send a portion of Yoshitomo’s ashes to you, and promised to bury them at the stupa. That was the sentence that made my wife rip your letter to shreds. My scribe had to piece the scraps back together to copy the death poem just as you’d written it.”

Oda’s words fluttered in his throat. “I told my wife I would send you a bottle of my own piss before I sent you a single speck of her beloved son’s ashes. Now I break my vow to her. I refuse to recognize this debt you say my son incurred against your house. If he ruined
your clan, you ruined mine. We are even. But I would not have Yoshitomo’s spirit wandering the earth in search of his final resting place. If I give you a vial of his ashes, will you bury it where he fell?”

“I swear it.”

“Then in exchange I will carry this letter of yours to the Lady in the North. Unopened and unread, upon my word. I ask only one thing of you: write it quickly, then be gone from my house.”

*   *   *

Daigoro was not as quick in writing his letter as his host might have liked. Katsushima readied their horses and still Daigoro hadn’t finished. Then Katsushima cajoled the healing woman in the kitchen into providing them with a little food for the ride. Daigoro only made negative progress: he set a candle flame to his first draft, scattered the ashes in the courtyard, and started afresh with a blank page.

It was hard to know what to write. He hadn’t forgotten what Aki had told him:
don’t provide your enemy the means to defeat you
. If Oda was as good as his word, then Daigoro could tell Nene anything he liked. If he was false, then Oda would betray him to Shichio at the first opportunity. It hardly mattered that Oda had never heard of Shichio. He’d already guessed Daigoro was a wanted man; he had only to announce Daigoro’s name and Shichio’s bear hunters would come straight to his door.

Thus if Daigoro set terms in his letter for how he and Nene should meet, he might as well write his own death poem. But if he did not set terms for meeting her, then how could they complete their pact? He needed a second audience with her, but it was too dangerous to nominate a place or a time.

“It’s dangerous to write
anything
,” Katsushima insisted. He knew the classics as well as Aki did. Sun Tzu’s famous maxim was at the core of Katsushima’s fighting style:
He wins his battles by making no mistakes. The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity to defeat the enemy.
“This
letter opens you to defeat,” Katsushima said, standing above the little desk where Daigoro sat and wrote.

“Only if Lord Oda has forgotten the virtues of
bushido
.”

“No. He need not abandon them; he need only be distracted for a moment. Gold,
sake
, pettiness, grief; any of these might persuade him to forget his oath to you. He might come to regret his betrayal within the hour, but by then it will be too late.”

“All right, all right,” Daigoro said. “At least your version is easy to write.”

Dipping his brush, he wrote three words.
I have it
. Then he folded and sealed the letter and they made ready to leave.

36

I
have it.

You clever boy, Nene thought. He was right not to trust his messenger. Oda Tomonosuke was a broken man. That much was clear by his windswept topknot and overlong fingernails. The man had managed to shave before meeting the most powerful woman in the empire, but that was all. The samurai prided themselves on bodily perfection, but even by a farmer’s standards, Lord Oda was a disheveled mess.

“Thank you so much for delivering this to me,” Nene said, suffusing her voice with deference and respect. She found men tended to give her what she wanted if she spoke to them in the same way she spoke to the emperor. “I know carrying a letter is far beneath your station.”

In truth that was almost all she knew about him. It was impossible to familiarize herself with all of her husband’s allies; by now his sworn daimyo numbered well over a hundred. Even so, Nene made it her business to memorize everything she could, and in the case of Oda Tomonosuke that was especially easy. The recent tragedies in his life were memorable: his son slain, his wife a suicide, his house destitute. The Odas were distant cousins to Oda Nobunaga, whom Nene audaciously considered a friend. Nobunaga had been the mightiest daimyo the empire had ever known, until that blackheart Akechi Mitsuhide ambushed him, trapped him in a temple, and set it ablaze. Hideyoshi
had been swift to avenge Nobunaga. He sent Akechi straight to hell, and with Nene’s help he swiftly eclipsed his predecessor and mentor.

Nobunaga’s great regard for Nene was one of the reasons Hideyoshi took her seriously. Or, put another way, if not for Nobunaga, Nene might have been just another wife. For that, the least Nene owed him was to remember the names of his cousins, even the little lordlings like Oda Tomonosuke.

“It must have been hard for you, sitting down to tea with the man who killed your son,” she said.

“More boy than man,” said Oda. “And we didn’t sit down to tea. I gave him a clean bed and had my steward round up the healers, that’s all.”

“Healers? Oh, I do hope it’s nothing serious.”

Oda winced. “Damn my flapping tongue. And damn the pact I made with that murderous devil. My lady, I promised I would not betray Daigoro to his enemies. I’ll not name you an enemy, but . . . well, you understand. I was to bring you the letter, nothing more.”

Ah, but you’ve told me so much, Nene thought. The ride from Oda’s home in Ayuchi to Nene’s manor in the Jurakudai was about forty
ri
—a day’s ride for a messenger on a fleet horse, at least two days’ ride for a man of Oda’s years. Judging by his unkempt appearance, he was no longer a man with the energy and initiative to make the ride in two days. Call it three, she thought, and immediately she imagined how far the Bear Cub might have traveled from Ayuchi in that time. By sea, he could have returned to Izu, or sailed as far south as Shikoku. By the Tokaido, it was hard to guess. There were too many variables.

“Well, never mind your healers; let’s pretend I didn’t hear that.” She smiled at him sweetly. “I heard only that you are a noble and generous man, to go to great expense to shelter a boy who has done your family such harm. Why, just providing him horse fodder is no mean expense in times of war.”

“Too true—as Daigoro knows damn well. He didn’t even offer to pay.”

So the Bear Cub travels on horseback, she thought. It made sense; she remembered the boy walked with a limp. Her map changed shape in her mind. The Tokaido was well maintained and patrolled; riders could travel with little fear of bandits,
yamabushi
, or sudden holes where their horses might break a leg. Her own messages could travel nearly a hundred
ri
in a single day, but that was because Toyotomi couriers had relay stations all along the Tokaido. No horse could cover that distance so swiftly on its own.

A lone boy, recently injured, on a well-fed horse. How far could he ride in three days? Would he risk the Tokaido, or did he still fear spies on the great roads? If he still rode with that woolly-haired
ronin
of his, the two of them might simply slaughter Shichio’s bear hunters wherever they found them. On the other hand, Daigoro was not one to walk into a trap and then figure out how to cut his way free of it. The safer path was to ride the back roads.

Again the map changed its contours in Nene’s mind. If he held to the great roads, he might be anywhere within, say, sixty
ri
of Lord Oda’s compound—including just outside my door, she realized with a start. Why was he not here already, and why had he not come with Streaming Dawn? That would have made matters so easy.

But there were no unwatched roads to Kyoto. Daigoro probably feared Shichio still had spies here. Nene shared the same worry herself; she could never be sure she’d rooted out every last one. No, the Bear Cub would not make himself seen if he did not have to. He would not come to her; she would have to find him, and that would not be easy. In all likelihood he traveled overland.

That would be slow going—and as the thought occurred to her, it dawned on her that she had no idea just how slow. Those pathways were entirely outside her ken. She knew how far her palanquin could bear her in a day, encumbered as it was by her entourage. She had a rough idea of how far her husband’s troops could range on a march,
and on a forced march. But how far a
ronin
could cross the wilds? Nene could not even hazard a guess.