Death at the Crossroads (Samurai Mysteries) Read online

  “S-s-see here, s-s-s-samurai, w-w-w-what’s going on?” The Magistrate stuttered in fear.

  Kaze saw a handful of arrows in the Magistrate’s other hand and pulled one out of the man’s shaking fist. The remaining arrows tumbled to the ground. Kaze walked over to a man with a torch and studied the arrow in the flickering light.

  “W-w-what’s going on? Here, here, answer me!” the Magistrate demanded.

  Kaze finished his inspection of the arrow, then looked around the crowd slowly to make sure there wasn’t another man with a bow that he missed.

  “T-t-tell me!” the Magistrate commanded.

  Kaze raised one hand in the air to quiet the crowd.

  “People of Suzaka village!” Kaze shouted. The milling group immediately hushed. Kaze looked at the concerned faces around him, then said, “Superb! Your courage and martial manner have driven away the bandits that were planning to attack this village. Omedeto! Congratulations!”

  Kaze started marching off, and the crowd opened up before him like the tall grass of summer falling away when you walk through an open field. As he made his way back to the manor, Kaze could hear the buzz of an excited village receding behind him.

  The peasants milled about, discussing the possibility that the new samurai was mad. Some thought that perhaps the samurai was right and that they had scared off an attack by brigands, but others scoffed at the notion that Boss Kuemon or any other brigand would be scared by any group of peasant rabble. As the excitement of the novel night wore off, groups of peasants started drifting back to their homes.

  Ichiro, the village headman, was one of the last to leave. Shaking his head over what the samurai was up to, he wearily went back to his house, where his wife and children had gone back to sleep long before. He placed his naginata in the corner of the main room of the house and looked at it speculatively for a few minutes. Then he went to a corner of the room and moved several bales of rice, clearing a section of the floor. He removed several of the loose floorboards and dug down into the earth, removing an old section of matting that had been covered with dirt as camouflage. Underneath was a shallow hole, lined with old rice-stalk mats.

  Ichiro got a twig from the kindling stack and lit it from the still-smoldering charcoal in the hearth. Using it like a crude candle, he examined the contents of his secret cache. In the flickering orange light, the oil on the weapons gleamed with a malevolent sheen. Two swords, a dagger, and a bow were nestled together in the shallow depression. Ichiro took the dagger from his forbidden armory and replaced the mat.

  CHAPTER 12

  Hanging between earth

  and eternity, I grab

  for earth and for life.

  The next morning, Kaze was escorted into Manase’s presence. Kaze had found his own clothes, newly cleaned, starched, and resewn, waiting for him when he got up, and this was what he was wearing.

  Manase was once again dressed in several sumptuous robes, forming a layered collection of color. He was sitting on a small veranda, looking over a garden of large rocks and shrubs. Kaze knew that in Heian Japan, the time of The Tale of Genji, the refinement of a woman was judged by how she layered her many multicolored kimonos. The delicacy of color, the transition of one color and pattern to the next, and the careful sculpting of overlapping pieces of cloth were all signs of sensitivity and refinement. He wondered if the same applied to a man, because Manase’s robes were all carefully layered and arranged to present a pleasing cascade of color.

  “I understand you caused an annoying commotion in the village last night,” Manase said, without turning to look at Kaze.

  Kaze gave a deep bow, even though Manase was not looking. “I apologize for disturbing the tranquillity of your District,” Kaze said, “but I wanted to see the weapons the peasants had. Sounding the alarm was one way to see those weapons without engaging in a tedious search. A warrior always grabs the weapon he’s most comfortable with when he’s put in sudden danger.”

  Manase gave his high-pitched laugh. “How clever! You are a highly entertaining man. What did you find?” Manase asked when he stopped laughing.

  “The only person in the village who grabbed a bow was the Magistrate.”

  Manase turned around and gave Kaze a look of surprise that was magnified by the false eyebrows painted high on his forehead. “You think the Magistrate killed that traveling merchant?”

  “I don’t know. The arrows used by the Magistrate were not the same as the arrow in the man at the crossroads. That arrow had a dark shaft and unusually fine fletching of gray goose feathers. The Magistrate’s arrows were crude things by comparison. Perhaps bandits did kill that man, and they were disturbed before they could rob him. I just don’t know why they would bother to dump the body at the crossroads.”

  “So now you think bandits killed that merchant?”

  “He wasn’t a merchant.”

  “What?”

  “The murdered man was a samurai.” The death of a samurai was much more serious than the death of any merchant. Merchants were actually in one of the lowest social classes. Only the eta, outcasts who handled unclean things like slaughtering animals and tanning hides, were lower on the social strata than merchants.

  “How do you know he was a samurai?” Manase demanded.

  “His sash was tied to hold two swords. I pointed out the sash to the Magistrate, but he either couldn’t see that or refused to see it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. The sash was loose where the two swords fit.”

  “But I was told the dead man looked like a merchant.”

  “I don’t shave my head, so without my sword I would also look like a traveler or merchant of some kind and not a samurai,” Kaze pointed out. Samurai typically shaved the front part of their heads, letting the rest of their hair grow long. The long hair was gathered and greased into a topknot, held in place by a dark cord. Kaze’s hair was left to grow and gathered in the back, but he did not shave the front part because of the inconvenience and the expense.

  Manase seemed to muse to himself, “How interesting. A samurai was killed. And you think it may be my own Magistrate who is the murderer.”

  “I’m not sure who the murderer is, Lord Manase. It could also be the bandits.”

  “But surely bandits wouldn’t attack a samurai.”

  “They attacked me.”

  “What? When?”

  “The other day. I walked to Higashi village, and three bandits attacked me on the road.”

  “What happened?”

  “Two bandits stopped me on the road, and a third tried to sneak up behind me to kill me. The murdered man was shot in the back, so maybe bandits tried the same ruse with him, only they were successful.”

  “How did you escape the bandits?”

  “I didn’t escape. I killed two. The third was young, so I let him escape me.”

  “You killed two of them?”

  “Yes. I buried them by the side of the road, because I was told that was the custom in this District.”

  Manase pulled a fan from the sleeve of his kimono and started waving it briskly. “Oh, this is all too much for me,” he confessed. “Since it was a samurai killed, we of course must make a better investigation of the circumstances of his death. How can you tell if it was the Magistrate or the bandits who killed him?”

  “I’ll try to find out more about the bandits, to see if they use bows in their attacks.”

  Manase snapped the fan shut. “Please continue your investigations, Matsuyama-san. I’m not a cruel or unreasonable man. If you can bring evidence to me that someone else murdered that man at the crossroads, I won’t crucify the charcoal seller. In the meantime, I’ll keep the peasant safe here, enjoying my hospitality.”

  “You can help by assigning some men to assist me in finding the bandit camp,” Kaze said. “That would make the search go faster.”

  “All right,” Manase said. “I’ll order the Magistrate to put together a search party to help you.”

/>   The next morning Kaze was shaking his head in disbelief. “These are the troops?” He looked at the ragtag band of militia before him. He expected professional warriors and instead he got armed peasants.

  “Here, here, I thought we were just going to find the bandit camp, not fight them,” Nagato said. “These men will be fine for just finding it.” The Magistrate had come to the gathering point on a horse, but the thick forest ahead meant he would have to walk from here. Across his back was a quiver, and in his hand was the bow that Kaze had seen when he had rousted out the village.

  Kaze was still skeptical, but the point of the search was to locate the camp, not destroy it, so he had to admit grudgingly that Nagato might be right. “Fine,” he conceded, “What direction do we search first?”

  “North,” Nagato said quickly.

  “Is that the direction we’re most likely to find the camp?”

  “Yes.”

  Kaze, not knowing the local geography, decided to go along with the Magistrate. If he was wrong, there would be time to search in other directions later. “All right,” Kaze answered.

  “Good, good,” the Magistrate said. “You men form a line, but stay within shouting distance. We’ll start north and continue until midday. The bandit camp can’t be farther than a half day away. If we haven’t found it by then, we’ll return here.”

  And search another direction tomorrow, Kaze silently added.

  “Where are you going to be?” Kaze asked the Magistrate.

  “I will be on the right wing. You take the left wing.” Normally the leaders would be in the center of a formation of men, but if the Magistrate wanted to try “the double-headed blossom” formation, where two leaders were on the wings, it didn’t bother Kaze.

  “Yosh! Let’s do it!” Kaze said, walking to the left so he could take up his position.

  The men strung out in a long line, with Kaze at one end and Nagato at the other. There was a large gap between each pair of men so the search party could cover as much ground as possible. With the distance between them and the obscuring brush and trees, each man could see only one or at most two others on each side of him.

  Kaze started forward, glimpsing the searcher to his right occasionally when the trees thinned out or when he was on a small hill. The day was sunny and the last residual heat of a humid summer clung to the trunks of trees, making the air thick and still. The heavy underbrush made progress difficult, and occasionally Kaze had to make a detour to keep moving forward. He soon lost sight of the searcher to the right. He was farther than hailing distance, but he had no intention of shouting if he found any sign of the bandits anyway. With this group of peasant militia, he didn’t want to alert the bandits or get into a fight with them.

  He kept his eyes open for the signs of a path or some other indication that humans were in the area. Thus far he had seen nothing of interest, except that a bamboo forest was growing to his left, encroaching on the territory of the pines and cryptomeria. Even in nature, there are wars for territory, Kaze thought.

  Because of the heat, he paused for a moment, sitting on the large gnarled root of a tree to rest. He pulled a small earthenware bottle from his sash and took out the peg that sealed the top. He tilted his head back to pour cool water into his mouth when he heard the familiar whistling sound of an arrow in flight. Kaze had been in battles where the sky was black with deadly shafts, and he knew that sound.

  Not pausing, Kaze simply tumbled backward off the root of the tree, falling behind it as the arrow struck the trunk with a solid thunk. Kaze had no time to see how close the arrow would have come, because from the woods there came a lusty shout from the throats of many men. From the undergrowth a dozen men emerged, all dressed in stolen cast-offs like the bandits he had met on the road. They brandished spears and swords, and their headlong charge would converge on Kaze’s position in just a few moments. Kaze rolled to his feet and started running. He had been ambushed.

  Kaze drew his sword. He was sure he would have heard that large a group of men getting into position, so they had been waiting for him. He had been set on a path designed to have him run into them. What he didn’t know was who had betrayed him: the Magistrate, Lord Manase, or someone else.

  In an instant he was out of the pine forest and running into the bamboo forest. The stalks of bamboo were as big around as a man’s arm, and the floor of the forest was littered with the nubs of bamboo shoots and slippery leaves. Kaze dodged through the stalks, darting right, then left, feeling the shiny bamboo stalks graze his shoulders as he made his way through the wild growth. In the thick growth he could never see more than a few feet before him, so he didn’t bother checking over his shoulder for his pursuers. He didn’t need to, because he heard the shouts of his attackers growing progressively fainter behind him. He was outdistancing them.

  Suddenly he burst out the bamboo forest and saw the earth drop away before him. He tried to come to a rapid halt, but the slippery bamboo leaves clogging the ground made his feet fly out from under him and he skidded over the edge of a precipice. He dropped his sword before it could go flying over the edge and clawed at the lip of the crevasse. He risked a quick look down and saw that he was hanging from the edge of a fissure formed by some past earthquake. Below him the bottom of the fissure was a great distance, and the rocky floor looked uninviting and dangerous.

  Willing his fingers to dig into the hard earth at the edge of the crevasse, he hung there for a few long moments, uncertain if his grip on the edge would save him or if the earth would give way, sending him to the bottom. It held.

  Pulling himself back onto the bank, Kaze heard the shouts of the approaching men. The ambush had been carefully planned. Kaze was now trapped on the edge of a tear in the earth that was too wide to jump, with his attackers about to burst upon him in a few seconds. Kaze picked up his sword and made a quick decision.

  He positioned himself next to a bamboo stalk growing at the edge of the fissure and drew his sword back with both hands. In his mind, he pictured the sword on the other side of the bamboo stalk, cleanly cutting it. He brought the sword down with authority and made his mental image of the completion of the stroke a reality. The stalk was now cleanly cleaved, and it fell forward, spanning the fissure with a narrow bridge, no wider than a man’s arm.

  The stalk was glossy, smooth, and slippery and looked too thin to cross on. Kaze was reminded of an acrobat he had once seen, who walked across a stretched rope using a bamboo and paper umbrella for balance. Kaze had superb balance, but he wasn’t sure he could negotiate this thin and tenuous bridge. The voices of the men chasing him were near, and it seemed he had no option.

  Taking a deep breath and holding his sword out for balance, Kaze started running on the stalk to cross the ravine. The flexible bamboo shaft bowed dangerously when he got to the middle, causing Kaze to momentarily lose his balance, teetering on the edge as the rocky floor of the fissure waited for him. He fought to control both his mind and body, centering himself literally and figuratively, pulling himself back upright on the fragile bridge. Wishing he were barefoot instead of in sandals so his feet could get a better purchase, Kaze made his way up the sloping bow of the bamboo and onto the other side. With a quick, one-handed swipe of the sword, Kaze cut the thin top of the bamboo, causing the stalk to fall into the fissure, eliminating the possibility that anyone, no matter how foolish or skilled, would follow him across. In an instant, he stood in the bamboo growing on the other side of the chasm.

  Kaze’s pursuers came to the edge of the fissure, but since they knew of its existence, they had slowed their pursuit and didn’t fall over its edge. They scanned the bottom of the chasm to see if they could find Kaze’s body, but noticed nothing. Puzzled, they concluded that Kaze must have somehow eluded them in the bamboo forest. They turned around and formed a search party of their own to see if they could locate him.

  As they did this, Kaze was already walking near the bank of the fissure, looking for a place where he could climb down into the chasm
and climb up the other side. He was more interested in seeing the arrow that precipitated the ambush than in completely eluding the men.

  After a great deal of searching, he found a place where he could climb down one side of the fissure and back up the other. When he finally made his way back to the location of the ambush, the sun was starting to move toward the horizon. Kaze was careful in his movements, taking time to assure himself that he wouldn’t stumble into another trap. When he finally came to the tree where he had stopped for water, he waited in hiding for several minutes to make sure the way was clear. He was glad he did.

  In the forest he could hear the sound of two men arguing, the voices getting more heated as they approached the ambush site.

  “… but he got away!”

  “That wasn’t our arrangement.”

  “I won’t pay for nothing!”

  “Now, now. I did what I agreed to. I must be paid!”

  “I’ll pay you nothing.”

  “We had an agreement, an agreement!”

  “But why should I—”

  “If you want me to do more—”

  “How about half?”

  “No, all!”

  “Half!”

  “Two thirds?”

  “All right.”

  “Done, done!”

  Nagato emerged from the forest and stopped. A muscular man with a potbelly and shoulders covered with tattoos appeared next to him, pulling out a pouch that was tucked into the side of his loincloth. Nagato still carried his bow and the half-naked man was carrying a spear. He stuck the spear into the earth and opened the pouch. The clink of coins could easily be heard as the tattooed man counted out coins into Nagato’s eager hands.

  Nagato’s betrayal neither surprised nor offended Kaze. In these times no person could be trusted, and Nagato had the kind of character that made him even less trustworthy than most. What offended Kaze was the sight of a samurai acting like a greedy merchant, snuffling around a peasant with money like a pig in heat.