Disciple of the Wind (56 page)

“Yasuda-dono,” Azami corrected. “We will also accept Yasuda-sama.”

“You’ll accept what I give you.”

Daigoro stepped out of his saddle, and hoped beyond hope that his right leg wouldn’t buckle when he hit the ground. It didn’t; Aki was there to support him. On any other day, he might have felt shame—a man was not supposed to need a woman’s help for anything—but a few nights ago he’d nearly been tortured to death, then nearly burned to death. Even the sword fights paled in comparison. If the embrace of his beloved was supposed to be shameful, then shame was the least of his injuries. The simple truth was that he thought he’d never feel her touch again. Now the smell of perfume in her hair nearly brought him to tears.

“Akiko, will you marry me?”

The question took her utterly by surprise—and not just her. Everyone else too. He supposed it should have, since this was the bluntest, clumsiest, most inept proposal ever uttered. A man did not ask such a thing of a woman; he asked it of her father. Even then, custom demanded a lengthy conversation, and usually a long bartering process as well. The last time Daigoro and Akiko were married, it was to cement a relationship between their houses. That was before they’d really known each other, and certainly before they’d fallen in love. This was something else entirely.

“You idiot,” she said. “I told you from the start: if you want to divorce me, you’ll have to grab hold of me and throw me out of the house. Otherwise, I don’t care what you sign with foreign lords. Here in Izu, you’re my husband and you always will be.”

Another couple might have kissed. Far more romantic for Daigoro and Akiko was for her to keep an arm around his waist, and for him to keep a hand on her shoulder, just so he would not collapse.

“There you have it,” Daigoro told Kenbei and Azami. “House Okuma does not recognize my divorce. In fact, there is no one left alive who does. That means I was very much mistaken when I entered here. I thought my name was Daigoro. In truth it is Okuma Izu-no-kami Daigoro. House Yasuda has loyally served my clan for generations. Now, Kenbei-san, will you serve or will you not?”

The furrows in Azami’s brow grew deeper. Kenbei’s eyes, the color of storm clouds, threatened lightning. “Daigoro or Okuma Daigoro, it makes no difference,” said Kenbei. “Your coffers are empty. Your clan is destitute. My brother’s pity for you outweighs his coin. Lord protector or no, you are in my debt.”

“Then I ask you to forgive the debt. As my loyal vassal. Will you obey?”

“What if we don’t?” Azami snapped. “We have heard from Lord Sora. He does not support you; he has only promised to stand clear of the fray. The same goes for Lord Mifune in the north and Lord Inoue in the south. What does it mean if your own father-in-law will not stand by you?”

“My father-in-law is not here. I will demand his fealty later. Today I demand yours.”

“No,” Kenbei said. “Izu is no longer your home, Bear Cub. You have no support here.”

“He has
my
support,” said a reedy voice behind him.

Yasuda Izu-no-kami Jinbei looked more ghost than man. His face was almost as pale as his snow-white topknot. He clutched a railing with bone-thin hands, but a fire burned in his eyes. Before leaving his sickroom he’d even taken the trouble to don his swords. Wracked by ague, he could scarcely bear their weight, so he kept his feet only through sheer force of will. He was, in short, the living spirit of
bushido
.

“He has
our
support,” the aging lord said. “Young master Daigoro is the third Okuma lord I have served. I had not thought to live long enough to kneel before a fourth, but by the gods, Kenbei, I would have guessed I’d live to serve a hundred more before I guessed one of my own sons would betray our closest friend.”

“Father, I—”

“Shut your mouth!” Kenbei shriveled like a dead worm in the sun. Azami remained adamant, balling her fists. “And you,” Lord Yasuda told her, “I have been patient with you for far too long. I have called you a she-bear before, but now I see you for what you are. Your tongue
drips venom into my son’s ears. Now you have made him one of your own: a viper.”

“Wrong,” she shouted back. “If I were a viper, I’d have poisoned you ages ago.”

“Azami!”

No one expected her husband to strike her, least of all Kenbei himself. Evidently he still retained enough filial devotion to take offense when his wife insulted his father. The whip-snap sound of his slap across her cheek seemed to hang in the air. He was well within his rights as a husband, but clearly it was a line he’d never crossed before. He froze like a rabbit, stunned at what he’d done.

Azami all but growled and bared her teeth. The breath came loud and long through her nostrils. Then she punched him in the jaw.

The woman had the forearms of a blacksmith. Her fist caught him on the tip of the chin and knocked him cold. If Kenbei’s slap made everyone gasp, Azami’s punch rendered all of them speechless.

Except for Lord Yasuda. “Be gone! And drag my fool of a son with you! Find a new hole to make your den; you are not welcome here anymore.”

The outburst was enough to make Lord Yasuda light-headed. He swooned, but his white-knuckled grip on the railing prevented him from falling over. Before he could right himself, a fit of coughing bent him double.

His eldest son, Jinichi, rushed to his side. Daigoro wanted to as well, and with Aki’s help he made a few hobbling steps in that direction. Lord Yasuda waved all of them off. “I’m all right—or if not
all
right, then at least right enough to keep my footing. Damn this demon in my lungs! And damn you, Jinichi, for letting things go this far.”

Jinichi kneeled and bowed. “I’m sorry, Father. When you made Kenbei steward of the Green Cliff, I thought—”

“You thought what? That he was fit to lead? I stationed him here so I could keep an eye on him.”

All eyes turned to Kenbei, who still lay as limp as a wet rag. Azami proved she was not quite as heartless as Daigoro supposed. She did not
drag her husband across the flagstones, as Lord Yasuda had commanded. Rather, she left Kenbei lying there to gather raindrops, and stormed off to their quarters to collect her things.

The wizened little lord bowed to Daigoro as deeply as he could manage. “You have my most abject apologies, Okuma-sama. I knew Kenbei was trouble from the moment I first met his sons. Mountain monkeys, all of them. I cannot imagine where he learned his fathering instincts, but I pray to all the gods and buddhas that it was not from me. I should never have agreed to marry his grandson to your mother, but you were in such need, and it seemed such a clever idea at the time. . . .”

“No apology is necessary,” Daigoro said. Together he and Aki finally made their way to Lord Yasuda’s side. “I asked a favor of you and you granted it without hesitation. What more could anyone ask? Azami spoke the truth: of all the lords protector, the only one to stand by the Okumas was you.”

“The only one to make trouble for the Okumas was me.”

“No, Yasuda-sama—”

“Enough with that
sama
nonsense. You are Lord Okuma Izu-no-kami Daigoro again. Now you listen. You will not know it, Okuma-sama, but once I was young like you. I used to go out drinking and whoring with my friends.” He gave Katsushima a knowing wink, which Katsushima returned in kind. “I used to get good and drunk in those days, but if I was ever so drunk as to mate with a monkey, I cannot remember it. It must have happened, though, because I do not know how else Kenbei came to be so unlike his brothers.”

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

“Ha! Laughter. That’s more like it. Now introduce me to this bride of yours. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

*   *   *

In the end, Aki and Daigoro stayed at the Green Cliff for three days. It was long enough for a Shinto priest to marry them—redundantly, as Aki insisted—and long enough for the old man to embrace Aki as
a granddaughter. Since Jinbei was so welcoming of her, Daigoro thought he ought to show House Yasuda similar generosity. “Lord Yasuda,” he said as they were readying to leave, “may I ask you to reconsider Kenbei’s fate? Even if you got him on a mistress, and even if your mistress was an ape, is he not still your son? You’re within your rights to turn him out, but . . . well, he is a Yasuda. Must he become a vagabond?”

Yasuda coughed. “It seems to me being a vagabond toughened you up some. He could do with a bit of that.”

Daigoro smiled and shook his head. “I suppose he could at that. But even so—”

“If he makes the same request, I’ll grant it. If not, he deserves to wander, or else to find a new den with that she-bear of his—or viper, or whatever it is I’m calling her these days.”

The old man laughed, which brought on a fit of coughing. Daigoro decided it was time to go, since his departure would remove Lord Yasuda’s last excuse for staying out of his sickbed. They bade their farewells and Aki and Daigoro called for their horses. Katsushima rode with them, and Old Yagyu too; his two new patients required more care than Lord Yasuda. Yagyu was optimistic about Katsushima’s hands, less so about keeping Daigoro’s gaping, bitelike wounds free of infection.

Daigoro’s mother and her infant husband sat in the shade of a palanquin, and an honor guard from the Okuma compound had ridden up to accompany them. They had brought one of Daigoro’s mares with them, wearing one of his old saddles, the kind that accommodated his withered leg. Sitting in that particular saddle, surrounded by that particular landscape, facing south on that particular road, it finally dawned on Daigoro that he was going home. Not merely the place of his birth but
his
house,
his
home, where once again he would sit as head of the clan and Lord Protector of Izu. He was Okuma Daigoro again. At the end of this ride, he would not just come back home; he would come back to himself.

He had the whole ride home to think about everything that meant for him—and not just for him, but for his unborn child, for the memory of his father and brother. When at last he reached the Okuma compound, riding through the great gate felt like stepping back into his own body. He swung out of the saddle, set foot in his courtyard, and said, “I’m
back.”

BOOK ELEVEN

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010
CE
)

49

M
ariko stubbornly dialed Han’s number again. He’d ignored the last four calls—or rather, he was tied up in the middle of a SWAT operation and didn’t have the attention to spare for personal calls. Mariko rang him anyway. It gave her something to do.

Otherwise, she was stuck sitting in the BMW, not four blocks from the Shinagawa rail yard. She’d have driven farther if only she knew where to go. The unfortunate truth was that she had no idea where Joko Daishi was or where he was headed. Her only clear idea was of what he’d do when he got there. He intended to purge close to a thousand children of their impurities. Or sacrifice them to purge Tokyo of its impurities, or some damn thing, anyway. Mariko didn’t know what the Divine Wind called it. Her term for it was mass murder.

Her call went to voice mail, so she called Han again. And again. On the eighth call he finally picked up. “What?”

“Car thirteen oh four,” she said. “Go to the north end and work your way back south; otherwise it’ll take you forever to get to it.”

It wasn’t lost on her that neither of them made any attempt at witty banter. It spoke volumes about how frazzled they were. She saw no need to correct it, and neither did Han. “Thirteen oh four,” he said. “You got anything more specific for me?”

“It’s a boxcar, brown and rusty, in a big string of eight identical cars. Somewhere in the middle—the fourth or fifth, maybe? Screw it, just look for the one with a guy padlocked to it.”

“Padlocked?”

“Yeah. Don’t open the doors; call the bomb squad first. I don’t think the car is rigged—I mean, they trusted a total idiot with the key—but you never know. Oh, and call paramedics too. You can tell them you think the kids were dosed with sleeping pills.”

“Mariko, how the hell am I supposed to explain where I got this information? People are going to ask.”

“Anonymous tip from a concerned citizen?”

“Concerned citizens don’t take down a suspect and leave him physically attached to the crime scene. You know who does that? Spider-Man.”

Mariko couldn’t help but laugh. “Then tell them Spider-Man did it. Hell, Han, I don’t know. You’ll figure something out.”

“Yeah, maybe, but it’s got to be something that doesn’t put you at the scene for assault—”

“And criminal trespassing and a million other charges. I know. Let’s take care of the kids first. Tomorrow we can talk about whether we can still pull my ass out of the fire.”

He didn’t take long to think about it. “Anonymous tip it is.”

“One more thing, Han. Get me a head count on the kids as soon as possible, okay?”

“It’s not twelve ninety?”

“No. Way less. I’m not sure how many, but if you can give me a number, it might help me narrow down the places I go looking for the others.”

Han was silent for a moment. Mariko heard a rasping noise and could picture him scratching his cheek where a long sideburn used to be. “Look, Mariko, I have to ask. Where are you getting this stuff?”

“All I can say is trust me.”

He sighed. “All right. But we’ll talk about this later,
neh
?”

“You bet. Oh, and Han? Hurry.”

She killed the call and pounded the steering wheel in frustration. A lot of detective work was done on the phone, and on most cases she
didn’t mind. But on this one she felt every second bleed away as if it were a drop of her own blood. She had to find that “new church,” but how? It could be anywhere, and Mariko had no one in the Divine Wind to question. The only members she knew by name, Akahata Daisuke and Hamaya Jiro, were both dead, and the only others she knew about were in that rail yard and probably in custody by now.

No, there was one more. She put in a call to Furukawa. “Status report,” he said.