Cloud of Sparrows (14 page)

“A wise man would always choose the soup,” Heiko said, “especially on such a cold day.” Genji’s smug expression irritated her no end. To let him see that would please him even more. She was not about to increase his satisfaction.

“I wonder. True wisdom would lead to beauty, would it not? What can warm the body and spirit more?” He had caught her in farmer’s garb and without makeup, it was true. But was the triumph his? Her lustrous hair flowed down her back like a Heian-era princess’s of a thousand years ago. The lack of powder, rouge, and other cosmetic artifices did not diminish her. Instead, her usually concealed natural self emanated a vitality and brightness that astounded him even more than her obvious physical allure.

“I beg to suggest your lordship is misinformed,” Heiko said. “Beauty can be colder than the harshest winter’s day. It is love, not beauty, that warms.”

“Well said, good farm woman.” Genji calmed his horse, which grew impatient with the long standstill. “Never have I heard such true words from the mouth of any Edo courtesan. Save one.”

“Your lordship is too kind.” Heiko smiled at Genji. With that simple compliment, he had restored her dignity.

“It is you who are too kind,” Genji said, returning her smile, “and too beautiful to hide yourself away in these Ginza woods. A cavalry captain will shortly come this way with two spare mounts, one for you and one for your maid. I plead with you to go with him to Edo, where you will find a better setting for your talents.”

“How can I refuse such generosity?” Heiko said.

“I wonder how long you will think me generous. Among the talents we need is your facility with the English language.”

Oh, no! It was all very clear to her now. Some emergency was taking Genji away from his outsider guests. He intended her to be their translator and companion in his absence.

“Farewell, Heiko.” He pulled the reins, turning his horse’s head in the direction of the New Bridge. “I’ll be back within the week.”

“Wait! Lord Genji!” Heiko took several steps in his direction. “I have never spoken but a few words of English, and that only with you. How can you leave me alone with outsiders?”

“You are too modest.” He smiled. “I have long believed you possess greater facility than you have demonstrated. Now you will have an opportunity to prove me right.”

“Lord Genji!”

But he bowed from the saddle, spurred his mount, and was gone at a gallop, followed by his three companions.

When Saiki arrived with two extra horses, Sachiko had already helped Heiko restore her proper appearance. The gruff old samurai said not a word to either of them on the ride back to Edo. It was just as well. Heiko was in too foul a mood for idle conversation.

That night, Genji and his men took shelter in a farmhouse at the northern edge of the Kanto Plain. The next day, they would enter Yoshino, the territory of Lord Gaiho, one of Genji’s sworn enemies.

They had no personal antagonism. Indeed, Genji wasn’t sure he would recognize Gaiho on sight. If he strained his memory, he generated a hazy image from which all details were absent. A stout cheerful man about sixty years of age. Or seventy. Was his nose sharp or blunt? His hair dark or gray? Dark, Genji thought, through the use of dye. That would suggest a certain vanity. So Gaiho was vain as well as stout and cheerful. When had they last seen each other? It was nearly three years ago, on the occasion of Tokugawa Iemochi’s installation as Shogun. They had been on opposite sides of the room, so Genji had caught no more than a passing glimpse of Gaiho. In truth, he wasn’t sure the man he had in mind was Gaiho at all. Yet this stranger would kill Genji on the slightest pretext if he could.

Nothing had happened between their families in their lifetimes, or in the lifetimes of their fathers or their grandfathers or even their grandfathers’ fathers. No insults had been given or received, no lovers tragically entangled, no battles fought over territory, influence, or pride. The problem was simple and unitary. It was the same problem for all the clans that ruled the two hundred sixty domains of the nation. The problem was Sekigahara.

Sekigahara was a small village in western Japan of no particular importance. Yet an event that had taken place there in the fourteenth year of the Emperor Go-yozei continued to dominate their lives. On a late autumn morning, as frost fell and fog lifted, two hundred thousand samurai divided into two huge opposing armies collided in a valley near the village. Half of them followed Tokugawa Ieyasu, Great Lord of Kanto. The other half rallied behind the banners of Ishida Mitsunari, Regent of Western Japan.

Genji’s ancestor, Nagamasa, sided with Ishida. A month before the battle, it had been revealed to him in a dream that the Tokugawa clan would be shorn of all powers and privileges, including their hereditary Great Lord status. By nightfall, Nagamasa and eighty thousand other samurai were dead, and Ieyasu reigned supreme. He soon became Shogun, and the title would remain in his family to the present day. Genji did not doubt the validity of his ancestor’s dream. He had simply not gotten the timing right.

Though Nagamasa died, and the Okumichi clan was on the losing side, they were not utterly destroyed. Enough opponents of the Tokugawas survived to prevent their complete annihilation. For two hundred sixty-one years, they had endured and contemplated revenge. At the same time, the Tokugawa partisans, Gaiho’s ancestors among them, had plotted their final destruction. This is what the Japanese had been doing for so long while the outsiders created science and conquered the world. And now, perhaps, while the Japanese continued to fight and refight the same ancient battle, the outsiders would also conquer Japan.

“Sir lord.” The farmer came crawling into the room on his knees, his head pushing against the floor like a plow. “Your honorable bath is ready.” The man’s thin body trembled with fear.

Genji wanted to tell him to get up. This was his home after all, and Genji was no more than an uninvited guest. But he could not say that, of course. He, like the farmer whose house he had requisitioned for the night, was bound to an ancient, unyielding etiquette.

“Thank you,” Genji said.

The farmer, still bowing, quickly shuffled out of the way so that the lord could pass without the bother of stepping around his own lowly body. Two hopes filled his fearful heart. The first was that the lord would not find his simple peasant’s tub offensive to his person. His wife and daughter had bloodied their hands in the hour since the lord’s arrival scrubbing it clean. He offered a silent prayer to Amida Buddha that it was clean enough. His second hope was that the lord, accustomed to the legendary courtesans of Edo, would not take an interest in his daughter. She was fifteen, in the first blossoming of womanhood, and thought to be the beauty of the village. He wished now that she were as homely as Muko’s daughter. He offered another silent prayer to Amida Buddha, begging the Compassionate One for protection and mercy through this dangerous night.

Outside, the farmer’s youngest son, sweating profusely, wiped down and fed the four horses while Taro watched. There was no suitable food here for the mounts of a lord, so he had run to the neighboring village and begged the headman there for hay. He returned with a fifty-pound bale on his back. He wished his older brother, Shinichi, were here to help. But a month earlier, he had been conscripted into Lord Gaiho’s army. Who knew where he was or when he would return home? War was coming. Everyone said so. War against the outsiders. War between the Shogun’s supporters and his enemies. Foreign war and civil war at the same time. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions would die. Perhaps Shinichi would be safer in the army than they would be on the farm. Genji stepped from the house. The boy dropped to the ground and buried his face in the dirt.

Hidé and Shimoda stood guard around the bathhouse. Genji found the farmer’s wife and daughter inside. They, too, knelt with their heads pressed against the ground. Like the farmer, their bodies trembled fearfully. Had he been a demon from hell, they could not have been more afraid. Come to think of it, to a farmer what difference was there between a demon and a lord?

Genji heard a sob escape from one of the women. Without looking, he knew it was the mother. She assumed, quite naturally, that he would require their assistance in bathing, would notice how nubile the daughter was, and would take her into his bed for the night. That is, if he was possessed of a patient nature. If not, he might take her here, on the ground, even before cleaning himself.

“You may go,” Genji said. “I prefer bathing in solitude.”

“Yes, sir lord,” the mother said, with her daughter echoing a moment after her, “Yes, sir lord.” Still on their knees, the two women backed out of the bathhouse.

Late that night, as the family huddled together in the storage shed, they speculated on the nature of the visitor in their house.

“He must be a courtier from the Imperial Capital,” the farmer whispered. “He seems too refined to be a warrior.”

“Those horses are warhorses,” the son said. “They barely tolerated my presence. If that bald-pated samurai hadn’t controlled them, they would have kicked me to death when I tried to feed them.”

“They may be joining Lord Gaiho’s army,” the mother said. “I hope they are. The more men he has, the safer our Shinichi will be.” She silently repeated a string of mantras to Amida Buddha, counting them off as if she held her precious sandalwood prayer beads in her hands. She missed them, but she was happy about where they were. A holy talisman around her firstborn child Shinichi’s neck. Surely they would ward off all evil, attract all good, and keep him safe. He was only sixteen and away from home for the first time.

“It’s possible,” the father said. “This young lord won’t be much help in battle. But his men look strong.”

“He could be a prince,” the daughter said. “He’s handsome enough.”

“Silence!” her father hissed, slapping into darkness and connecting with her face.

“Ow!”

“Whoever he is, he’s used to taking what he wants. You stay in here until they leave in the morning.”

But their four visitors were gone before the sun rose. When the farmer returned to his home, he found a scarf of saffron silk neatly folded and placed on the altar of the family’s humble household shrine. When he took it to Edo the next week, he found it was worth more than his share of the previous year’s rice harvest.

Genji and his men were astride strong horses and they rode them hard. At this pace, they would reach Mushindo Monastery by midday. They had managed to cross nearly the entirety of Yoshino Domain without encountering any of Gaiho’s troops. Beyond the next stream was the territory of Genji’s friend, Hiromitsu, Great Lord of Yamakawa. Hiromitsu was another man Genji would have trouble recognizing. He was a friend in the same sense, and for the same reason, that Gaiho was an enemy. Hiromitsu’s long-ago ancestor had also been on the losing side at Sekigahara.

Rounding the last bend in the road before the border, they encountered five mounted samurai at the head of a column of forty pikemen. These, too, were moving southwest like the others Taro had seen.

Genji slowed to a walking pace, giving the band of soldiers time to move to the side of the road. Though he wore no crest and flew no banner, his mode of dress, the quality of his mount, the demeanor of his companions, all clearly identified him as a lord. Social convention required those of lower rank to yield.

But these men did not. Their leader shouted, “Make way, there!”

Genji reined his horse to a halt. Had he seen the soldiers earlier, he could have led his men out of sight and gone on when the way was clear. But it was too late for that. He could not honorably surrender the right-of-way to an oaf of such low breeding. He sat quietly in the saddle and waited for the obstruction to be cleared.

Hidé spurred his horse forward until he was directly in front of the troop leader. He said, “A man of rank, traveling incognito, honors you with his passage!”

The samurai laughed. “A man of rank? I see no such person. Only four bedraggled wanderers far from where they belong. Leave the road! We travel under orders from Lord Gaiho. We have priority.”

“Descend to your proper level!” Hidé was outraged. “Do you not know a lord when you see one?”

“There are lords, and there are lords.” Sneering, the samurai put his hand on the double-barreled flintlock pistol in his sash. “Times are changing. The strong rise. Degenerate vestiges of the past will be swept aside.”

What happened next happened very quickly.

Hidé didn’t say another word. Blurred steel flashed in his hands and traced a thin red line in the leader’s body from the left side of his neck to his right armpit. A moment later, the man’s torso split in two and blood spewed into the air in every direction.

The blood-splattered samurai next to the falling corpse reached for his sword. Before an inch of blade showed in his scabbard, Shimoda’s arrow whirred into his heart and he, too, fell from the saddle.

“Aaaiiiii!” Taro, sword out to the side like a scythe, kicked his horse into a charge at the opposing formation.

One of the remaining mounted samurai waved his sword in the air and called out commands. “Form battle ranks! Form bahhhgghhh . . . !” He clutched the arrow that suddenly blossomed in his throat, dropped his sword, and toppled from his horse.

The column of pikemen broke, flinging their weapons aside and screaming in panic. Most of them fled into the woods. A less fortunate handful turned and ran down the road. These were the ones Taro pursued. He whipped his blade to the left and right of his horse’s head as he galloped through their midst. Dirt turned to bloody mud in his wake.