Kill the Shogun (Samurai Mysteries) Read online

  “No,” Ieyasu said quietly. “It’s actually a good idea. Our efforts to find this Matsuyama have so far failed.” Yoshida blushed. “It might be good to try another approach. Sometimes you’re too direct, Honda. It you’ve assaulted the front of the castle a dozen times with no success, walking through the back door is the best thing you can do.”

  “It’s just a total waste of time,” Honda objected. “I’m still against it.”

  Ieyasu ignored his blustery general. “Yoshida-san.”

  “Yes, Ieyasu-sama!”

  “Take a squad of men to the gun maker’s house. Toyama-san is right. I do think only a gun made by Inatomi could have been used in the assassination attempt. Get me a list of who Inatomi-sensei has sold his guns to. He takes such care with the manufacture of his weapons, I don’t imagine he’s made that many of them. If nothing else, the list will give us a basis for identifying lords who may be in conspiracy with this Matsuyama Kaze.”

  “I’ll be happy to send my men,” Okubo offered.

  “No, I want Yoshida-san to do this,” Ieyasu replied.

  “Immediately, Ieyasu-sama!” Yoshida got to his feet and strode out of the room.

  Honda glared at the retreating daimyo, while Toyama basked in the thought that his idea had been a good one.

  Two hours later, Kaze trudged up a hill in Ueno, still disguised as an old man. After seeing the assassination site, he also had come to the conclusion that only a gun by Inatomi Gaiki could have been used, and he wanted to talk to Inatomi. He stopped for a moment, leaning on his walking stick and getting his bearings.

  He walked over to a roadside shop and asked directions to Inatomi-sensei’s house. Kaze used the title sensei, which meant teacher, to indicate that he knew that Inatomi was also a master.

  Getting directions, he made his way down the road to the house of the well-to-do craftsman. He stopped at the door and entered. The house would be a sales outlet as well as a residence, so he had no compunction about entering. The entryway was a dirt square, surrounded by the house floor, which was a raised wooden platform. Here visitors were expected to stop, remove their sandals, and get properly greeted by servants or a member of the craftsman’s family.

  He called out, “Sumimasen! Excuse me!”

  Silence met his greeting. This was unusual. A craftsman’s house was always occupied, because it was also a place of business.

  “Sumimasen!” Kaze shouted, thinking that perhaps he wasn’t heard the first time. Again, no response.

  Kaze sat on the raised floor and removed his sandals. In the air he smelled smoke. It wasn’t the pleasant smell of a charcoal fire, but something more acrid and pungent. He decided to investigate. Fire was the great fear of all Japanese households. With paper and wood houses, this fear was not idle. Every Japanese city had periodic and disastrous fires, and in the pantheon of crimes, arson was considered the most heinous, next to treason.

  As Kaze walked through the house, there was an unnatural silence to it. The house was a large one, one that would house a master, several apprentices, and a support staff of servants. In such a house there would always be a natural buzz of activity as people went about the business of daily life. This house was lifeless, and Kaze wondered where its inhabitants were, and why they had abandoned the house during the middle of the day, leaving a fire burning.

  He walked from the entry into a sitting room, where Master Inatomi probably greeted important guests and conducted business. It was a spacious, twelve-mat room with a beautiful wooden rack along one wall. On the rack was a matchlock musket, made by Inatomi-sensei.

  Kaze’s weapon was the sword, and he was an expert at judging a blade with a single glance. He was not as familiar with muskets, but even his relatively inexperienced eye could see that this weapon was also a work of art. The barrel was a sleek tube, with decorative engraving on its side. The matchlock mechanism was as finely made as a delicate porcelain sakè flask. A curved piece of steel held a rope fuse, which was lighted when the gun was to be fired. When the trigger was pulled, the lighted match was pushed into a hole and ignited the gunpowder in the barrel. The short wooden stock was beautifully grained and shaped, and polished to a high gloss. The weapon was an expert amalgam of deadly function and aesthetic craftsmanship.

  Past the sitting room, Kaze entered a hallway. It went the length of the house to the back. It was there he found the first body.

  It was a woman in her late thirties. She appeared to be a maid, dressed in a common gray kimono. She was lying on her face, one hand twisted behind her back, reaching for the terrible cut that stretched from her neck to her waist. Someone had cut her down as she ran. Kaze checked briefly to make sure she was dead, then continued walking down the hallway.

  In a room that was an office, he found the source of the smoke. The room had sliding screens along two walls. These were shoved back, revealing shelves. If the room was used as a bedroom, the futons, pillows, and other sleeping gear would be kept on the shelves, ready to be brought out each night at bedtime. In this room, the shelves were used to store various papers, either folded or rolled into scrolls. Most of the papers were knocked off the shelves and spread on the floor. Kaze glanced at them, using his walking stick to move them slightly so he could get a better look at them. They seemed to be a mixture of personal correspondence, business records, and diagrams of matchlock gun designs. In the center of the room was a copper box, filled with sand and used to burn charcoal in the winter. The smoke came from this box.

  Kaze walked over and looked at the ashes left smoldering in the box. The fragile paper embers were still red. The flames from the paper burnt in the box had only recently died. Kaze surmised they were business records, perhaps listing who owned the guns made by Inatomi Gaiki. Obviously, someone else had realized that the choice of weapon would form a link that might lead to the assassins, and they had taken steps to break that chain.

  He found another dead woman in the kitchen, but didn’t find the real carnage until he walked out of the back door of the house.

  At the back of the house was a garden in the Chinese style. The carefully shaped azalea bushes were woven between serpentine paths of clean, white gravel. The yard was encircled by a high, bamboo fence. Against one wall of the fence were large rocks, chosen and artfully placed to give the illusion of a distant mountain range. It was a fine garden, perfectly in keeping with the artistic sensibilities Kaze saw in the craftsmanship of the musket.

  The white gravel paths were stained red by the blood of bodies spread around the yard. Most of the bodies were on the main path, which led to a workshop at the back of the garden. The bodies of another woman and three men were sprawled across the path, each twisted in the pain of their death agony. Kaze paused to put on a pair of the wooden geta that were by the back door. These were raised wooden slippers, left conveniently for the use of people leaving the house, where they were in their tabi socks, and going out to the garden and workshop.

  Kaze stopped for a moment to examine the cuts on the bodies. He could tell from the slashes that they were made by several men, not a single swordsman. He saw cuts made by at least three different styles of swordsmanship. The men were good swordsmen but not experts. Against unarmed women, servants, and apprentices, it didn’t require much skill.

  Kaze walked sadly to the workshop knowing what he would find.

  The workshop had a large forge, filled with glowing charcoal, much like the forges used by swordsmiths. In the workshop were a variety of files and jigs that would not be used by swordsmiths; the particular tools of the gunsmith. Kaze glanced up at the corner of the workshop and saw a shrine to the God of the Forge. Then he looked down.

  There were two other young men in the workshop, and a gray-haired older man: Inatomi and two apprentices. The face of Inatomi looked surprised, even in death. The slashing cut that half severed his neck must have come suddenly, perhaps from someone he knew. It was probably the signal to start the slaughter of the rest by samurai who stood outside th
e workshop, guarding the other members of the household in the garden. Two women had apparently managed to flee, one making it to the kitchen before she was cut down and the other almost making it outside the house before she was killed in the hall.

  Nine people killed so a tenuous link to the attempted assassination of Ieyasu could be broken. Nine people, including a master who could craft beautiful objects like the musket that Kaze saw in the front room of the house. Life was fleeting. Kaze knew that. And all was an illusion. Kaze knew and believed that, too. But it seemed a colossal waste to snuff out the talent represented by Inatomi and his household.

  If you were a dancer, a musician, or an actor, your skills died with you. Even if people talked about your skills after your death, this talk would be a mere shadow of the actual act. Even swordsmen fell into this category, Kaze reflected. Once you ceased to exist, your art ceased with you. If you were a poet, painter, or artisan like Inatomi, some of your creations would exist after your death, but the real art was in the steady hands, the intelligence, the sense of balance and proportion, and the skill to create new poems, pictures, and beautiful objects. This creative ability died with the artist, and even if the work of the artist lived on, this work was now circumscribed by a finite body of work. Nothing new would ever be created by this particular artist, to surprise, delight, and enlighten new audiences.

  Kaze sighed. He decided to do something out of respect for the skill of Inatomi-sensei that he usually only did to propitiate the souls of people he had slain. He looked about the workshop and found a piece of fine chestnut wood. Perhaps Inatomi-sensei was going to use it for a musket stock. On a workbench, Kaze found a knife and, amid the carnage and bodies around him, he sat in the doorway of the workshop and started to carve the wood.

  Yoshida rode up to Inatomi’s house, leading ten mounted samurai. As he reached the front of the house, one of the samurai leapt off his horse and rushed forward to hold the reins of Yoshida’s stallion.

  “Captain!” Yoshida said.

  A samurai rode forward. “Yes, Yoshida-sama?”

  “Go in and tell Inatomi-sensei that I have arrived. Tell him it is on business from the Shogun himself!”

  “Yes, my Lord!” The captain rushed into the house, but returned a few minutes later, puzzled.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the house, my Lord.”

  “Ridiculous! Even if Inatomi-sensei is out, his servants or apprentices will be here.”

  “I called several times, but no one came to the door to greet me.”

  “Did you look in the house?”

  “No, Yoshida-sama, I thought—”

  “Idiot! We’re here on the Shogun’s business! Take some men and search the house. Find out why there’s no one to greet us.”

  Chagrined, the captain motioned to three samurai to dismount and follow him. They entered the house, pausing to remove their sandals at the doorway out of habit and respect. In moments they found the dead maid.

  All the samurai took out their swords. “Follow me,” the captain ordered. They quietly made their way through the house, pausing at the office and the kitchen with the second body, and into the back garden. The captain sucked in his breath at the sight of so many bodies in the garden. In the doorway of the workshop at the end of the garden, a flash of movement caught his eye. He signaled his men to follow him, and they didn’t bother to stop to put on the geta. They made their way across the garden, their feet, clad in only tabi socks, muffling their footsteps. They carefully approached the workshop door.

  As they reached the doorway, the captain was able to see more bodies in the workshop. He also saw a living person doing something peculiar.

  There was what seemed to be an old man placing a wooden statue on a workbench. The figure wore an old but respectable kimono and a farmer’s woven straw hat. Wisps of gray hair peeked out from the edge of the hat and partially obscured the face of the figure, but the man’s muscular arms didn’t look like the wasted limbs of an ojiisan. The captain looked at the statue and was surprised to see it was a Kannon, a statue of the Goddess of Mercy, carved from chestnut wood. The serene face of the Goddess looked out at the carnage in the workshop and garden, providing some grace to the souls of the slaughtered.

  “Oi! You!” the captain said. “Stay where you are. I want to talk to you about what happened here.”

  Without showing the slightest surprise at the captain’s shout, the old man smoothly placed the Kannon on the shelf and reached forward for a shovel that was sitting next to the forge. He scooped out a shovelful of the forge’s contents and tossed it out the door of the workshop.

  Puzzled by this action, the captain told the samurai with him, “Get him.”

  With their swords naked, the three samurai rushed forward, only to start hopping about as they approached the workshop door. The red-hot coals from the forge burnt through their tabiclad feet.

  In the seconds this bought him, the old man picked up a walking stick and charged out of the shop. His wooden geta shielded his feet from the hot coals.

  Still recoiling from the burning coals, the lead samurai took an off-balanced, one-handed cut at the old man. The old man used his stick to knock the sword blade out of the way; then he rapped the wrist of the samurai with a sharp cut, as neatly executed as any fencing teacher using a wooden bokken practice sword. The captain heard a crack as the stick hit the samurai’s wrist, and the samurai, his wrist broken, yelped and dropped his sword.

  “That’s not an old man,” the captain barked. “Kill him!”

  The man reached down to pick up the dropped sword, and a second samurai took a vicious cut at his arm. The man smoothly changed the movement of his arm, causing the blade to miss by the smallest of measures. Then he picked up the sword and brought it up in time to parry a blow by the third samurai. His agility and balance, perched on the wooden geta, was amazing.

  Instead of sparring with the two samurai, the man charged the captain. In one hand he had the sword, in the other the walking stick. The captain took an overhead, two-handed cut at the man. The man met the blow with the sword, bending slightly to absorb the shock with his upraised arm. Before the captain could disengage his sword, the walking stick came round and struck the captain in the side of the head. The captain collapsed, knocked senseless, as the man bolted into the house.

  CHAPTER 14

  The wind in my face.

  The horse in fluid motion.

  Freedom on four hooves.

  Yoshida was still in front of the gunsmith’s house, waiting impatiently for the captain to report back. He was about to send other samurai into the house to see what the situation was, when a man burst out of the front door of the house, brandishing a sword in one hand and a stick in the other. He had the hair of an old man, but the quickness and agility of a man in his prime.

  Yoshida opened his mouth to shout an order to the remaining samurai, but before sound could escape his lips, the man took a cut at the reins of his horse. The sword cleanly cut the reins, which were still being held by the samurai on the ground. This samurai, in shock, looked stupidly at the limp cords hanging from his hand.

  The man immediately hit Yoshida’s horse on the rump with the stick. Frightened, the horse bolted, carrying Yoshida off down the road at a full gallop. In ancient days, samurai were trained to ride horses without holding the reins, so they could shoot a bow and arrow at a full gallop. With the emphasis on the sword and the musket, the art of mounted archery had been diminished for all samurai, and Yoshida could only grab at his horse’s mane in an effort to bring the animal under control.

  Yoshida’s samurai were frozen for an instant, uncertain if they should ride down the attacker or chase after their Lord. This instant was all Kaze needed. He sprang to the saddle of one of the unoccupied horses, just as two samurai burst from the house, adding to the confusion. Pulling on the reins to wheel the animal about, Kaze set off down the road in the opposite direction from Yoshida’s fleeing mount.

  T
hree samurai decided to pursue Kaze, and the rest set off to catch Yoshida and bring his runaway horse under control.

  As Kaze thundered down the road, he looked over his shoulder and saw his three pursuers. The fastest was approaching him rapidly, mounted on a better horse.

  Kaze was riding toward Edo. With the expansion of Edo, the village of Ueno was eventually becoming a satellite of the capital, and the road between the two was fairly populated. As the horsemen rode down the road, peasants, servants, and merchants scattered like leaves before an approaching whirlwind. Kaze knew that when he reached Edo, the crowded streets would end the pursuit, and the samurai chasing him could count on help from the many officers patrolling the streets of the city. From that, Kaze also knew he would have to settle things quickly.

  As the lead samurai caught him, Kaze slowed slightly to bring the samurai next to him. Kaze didn’t want the samurai behind him, where he could slash at the horse’s hindquarters to cripple Kaze’s mount. The samurai drew his sword and took a cut at Kaze’s head. Kaze ducked and threw the walking stick at the samurai with all the force he could muster. The samurai ducked, but not quickly enough. The stick caught the samurai across the forehead. He wobbled in the saddle for several strides of the horse, then neatly slid out of the saddle, falling to the dirt road in a sprawl.

  Kaze quickly shifted his sword to his other hand, just in time to parry a cut by the second samurai, who had just caught him. Kaze blocked a second cut, then shifted his weight so he could lean out to one side of the horse, closer to the samurai. Kaze quickly brought his sword upward, striking the samurai in the side. The samurai looked uncomprehendingly down at his flank, just starting to spurt blood. As the pain struck him, a cry burst from his lips and his horse immediately started to slow down, no longer spurred on by kicks in the side from its rider.

  Kaze spun in his saddle and looked at the third samurai. Using the first finger on his sword hand, he crooked it and motioned to the samurai to come forward for his turn. The samurai looked at Kaze’s urging, then glanced over his shoulder at his two companions, one a receding dot sprawled on his back in the road and the other a man clutching at his side, trying to staunch the flow of blood. His eyes wide with fear, the samurai looked back at Kaze and shook his head, declining Kaze’s invitation to come forward and fight. Instead, he simply started slowing his horse, allowing Kaze to outdistance him as he fell farther and farther behind.