Death at the Crossroads (Samurai Mysteries) Page 4

  Nagato gave a final bow and left the chamber of the District Lord. As soon as he was out of the room, he gave a sigh of relief. The Lord had not asked too many questions, and he had not been ordered to capture the samurai. Nagato’s objectives for the interview had been met. He swaggered down the path from the Lord’s manor to the village.

  It was a fifteen-minute walk from the Lord’s manor to the village. As he made his way on the path, Nagato congratulated himself for outsmarting the weird Lord. All too often, the Lord had made it clear that he considered Nagato a fool, openly laughing at some of Nagato’s responses to the cryptic questions he asked. The snot.

  The Lord affected the old-time courtly speech of nobles, but Nagato knew that the Lord’s family was no more noble than his own. They were both samurai, and although Nagato had let his own martial skills decline over the years, he was still convinced that he could best the effete Lord in a duel, if only the iron-clad bindings of duty would allow such a thing. Instead, because of an accident of battle that everyone in the village knew, the small, pasty-faced man sitting in the darkened room was absolute master of the District, and Nagato was Magistrate, sworn to serve him until death. Nagato summoned up a viscous ball of phlegm from deep within his throat and spat it out on the side of the path.

  The unfairness of the situation was something that Nagato ruminated on often, especially when he was in his cups and feeling unhappy with his circumstances in life. It was a dangerous feeling to have, but it was a dangerous time. If the Taiko had risen from peasant to ruler of Japan, why couldn’t a samurai like Nagato Takamasu dream of ruling one miserable, 150-koku district like this one? (A koku was the amount of rice it took to keep one warrior fed for a year.) This was a common fantasy for the Magistrate, and it was a measure of his limited horizons that his fantasies never extended to ruling more than the tiny mountain district. Unfortunately, despite his fearsome attitude toward the farmers and peasants of the village, Nagato was not even the ruler of his own household.

  Nagato’s mother-in-law had reached the age of sixty-one, the traditional age when a Japanese could say and do what he or she pleased. Of course, she had never inhibited herself too much from doing that anyway, at least in the confines of the Nagato house. But she was increasingly more blatant about her disappointment over the adoption of Nagato.

  The Magistrate was not born a son of the Nagato household, and the old woman would lament that her now-deceased husband had made a terrible mistake in his haste to perpetuate the Nagato line. The Magistrate also thought a mistake was made, but for very different reasons.

  The Magistrate was the firstborn son of Hotta Masahiro. By tradition, the firstborn son should inherit the rights and lands of his father, but the fact that the Magistrate had been offered for adoption meant that he was actually the product of a love affair that occurred before his mother married Hotta. Otherwise, a firstborn son would never be adopted out. Undoubtedly, this love affair had been with someone other than Hotta, although the Magistrate was never able to ascertain who his real father was.

  An unexpected pregnancy would also explain why his mother, who was of a higher social status than Hotta, would marry beneath her. It was hard to arrange marriages on short notice with families of equal social status. Such marriages were complicated affairs done to solidify position or, by using the marriage to cement a military alliance, security. They took considerable time, and with a pregnant daughter growing larger by the day, a family did not have as much time as a normal marriage would require. It could arrange a marriage that was a step down the social ladder much faster than a union of peers. The groom who accepted such a bride ended up with a mate that enhanced his social status, even though the pregnancy was obviously an embarrassing inconvenience that would have to be ignored.

  The Magistrate’s mother had married beneath her, and sending her firstborn to be adopted by the Nagatos was a further step down for the child. Since the child was not really a Hotta, his reputed father could adopt him out with no social stigma attached to the transaction. Hotta was a doting father to his own children, but the Magistrate was never given the privileges that a firstborn son should receive in a Japanese family, and even at an early age he knew it. When the child became a teenager, Hotta saw an opportunity to get rid of a longtime embarrassment and had him married and adopted into the Nagato family.

  The Nagatos had no male heir, and they were using their daughter as a way to continue the Nagato name. A husband would be found for their daughter, and then the new son-in-law would be adopted into the family, assuming the Nagato name. Then the next generation would be “real” Nagatos.

  Since the adoption could be undone, the Nagato family had tremendous power over the Magistrate, forcing him to put up with a meddling mother-in-law and a disobedient wife. The wife took strength and pleasure from her mother’s support and sharp tongue, and together they would regularly berate the man who was supposed to be the strong force in the District. It made Nagato feel small and impotent to be trapped in life by the indiscretion of his mother.

  Still, Nagato thought, it was possible to better yourself even if you couldn’t undo a bad birth, a worse marriage, or a position as the vassal of a strange District Lord. It only required money, and money was what Nagato was focused on currently because he had a goal. He wanted a concubine.

  Nagato’s wife had done her duty by bearing him a son; a small, nasty child that clung to, and acted like, his mother. Having done her duty, she was not expected to bring passion into his life. For that, a samurai was expected to find other women or boys. She, of course, was expected to remain faithful to him while he satisfied his appetites with others.

  Nagato was a man of large appetites, but except for food, his appetites had been thwarted. Power, money, status, and women had eluded him. Now he was determined to change that. Money was the key, and once he had money, he could have the rest.

  He idly thought about whom he would acquire as his concubine. That fool of a village headman, Ichiro, had a tasty eleven-year-old daughter who would do for a start. She was artless, but the thought of her taut skin brought a familiar stirring to his groin.

  Nagato was taught that grace and delicacy were the marks of femininity, but the child was gawky and awkward and ran around the village like a boy. He was taught that soft flesh and a lack of muscle was desirable in a woman, but the child had bony limbs and she had already been hardened by a short lifetime filled with work. He was taught that refinement in the arts was erotic, but the child was ignorant in the ways of the Court and culture and only familiar with the life of a farmer. He was taught that the nape of a long, swanlike neck was the apex of feminine beauty, but her neck was short and stubby. Finally, as Nagato could see for himself when the child walked around, she had large peasant’s feet, not the tiny mincing feet he associated with a lovely woman.

  Despite all this, the child still provoked Nagato’s lust for a simple reason: She was vulnerable.

  How such a succulent morsel could come from that bag of bones of a village headman was beyond Nagato’s comprehension. He had often intimated that he would be willing to bestow his favors on the headman’s nubile daughter, but the peasant always seemed oblivious to what Nagato was talking about. Nagato sighed. Peasants were always so stupid! No matter; when the money was there he could simply buy the girl from the fool.

  “Tadaima! I’m home!” he gruffly shouted as he entered his house, which was bigger and grander than that of the peasants in the village. He sat at the entryway and untied his sandals. His wizened mother-in-law came to greet him, instead of his wife, as was proper. She curled up her nose as she approached him.

  “You smell of that place again. You’ve been up to see the Lord. Wash your dirty body before you come into the house,” the old woman ordered.

  Nagato’s lips twisted with frustration and hatred, but he stepped outside to comply.

  CHAPTER 4

  A warm fire with a

  kettle bubbling over it.

  It’
s good to have friends.

  “Food?”

  “Yes.”

  Jiro ladled out some porridge made from millet and brown rice into a bowl. He begrudged the use of rice in the meal, but he thought he should add it to the millet or the samurai might get angry with him.

  Both men were in Jiro’s farmhouse, sitting on a raised wooden platform that formed the main flooring for the hut. The farmhouse was perhaps eight paces long by six wide, with a high thatched roof, the underside of which was made black with soot. In the joists of the roof, crude platforms of bamboo were built to act as storage places. The walls of the hut were planks hand sawn but painstakingly fitted together so the biting winds of winter would not cut through the joints to freeze the inhabitants of the hut. The planks fitted between posts and beams, many of which were left in a seminatural shape: the bark and limbs trimmed off, but the natural shape of the trunk remaining. Like the underside of the thatch, all the wood had been smoked to a dark color by countless fires used to provide heat and to cook food. The entire house was put together with cunning joints that locked it together, along with a few pegs.

  The fire was made in a gap in the center of the platform that Jiro and Kaze sat on. There, in an open square in the floorboards, a charcoal fire was glowing on the exposed ground below. Hanging over the fire, from a rope thrown over a beam in the roof, was an iron pot with the bubbling porridge. By raising or lowering the other end of the rope and tying it off, Jiro could control the cooking temperature.

  A steady stream of gray wisps rose from the fire and curled past the pot, wafting up into the recesses of the thatched roof. It was supposed to escape through a hole in the eaves, but the truth was that a great deal of the smoke remained to permeate the entire farmhouse, causing watery eyes and drying the throat to a leathery consistency.

  High in the rafters, on the ridgepole of the roof, was a black-painted arrow pointing northeast, the kimon, or devil’s direction. The arrow was tied with hemp rope, a Shinto ceremonial article, and it was designed to keep away evil spirits. Jiro’s grandfather and the carpenter who supervised the building of the house had tied the arrow there as part of the construction rites more than ninety years before. The entire village had participated in the construction of the house, just as Jiro, his father, and his father before him had participated in the construction of all the other houses in the village. If a house survived earthquakes, fires, and war, it might stay in a family for hundreds of years, little bits of it being constantly renewed and replaced as age and rot took their toll. In that way it was like a family or the village itself because the long-term survival of the whole was more important than the survival of any individual piece.

  Jiro handed the bowl of porridge over to Kaze. As Kaze accepted the bowl, he did something astonishing. He gave a small nod of his head to acknowledge the food and thank Jiro. In his entire fifty years, Jiro had never had a samurai thank him for anything, much less give a bow to him, however small. He almost dropped the ladle.

  Kaze acted as if he had done nothing unusual. He brought the bowl to his face and, using a pair of hashi, chopsticks, he shoveled some of the porridge into his mouth, sucking air in along with porridge to cool the hot mixture. “It’s good,” he said.

  Jiro stared at this unusual man, not sure what to make of him. When they returned to the village of Suzaka, the Magistrate went off to report to the District Lord. Jiro had offered Kaze breakfast, but Kaze refused, saying he had eaten some toasted rice balls when he started on the road that morning.

  Jiro spent the morning delivering charcoal to his regular customers. Kaze also roamed the village, looking as if he were searching for something. His presence made the villagers nervous, and in a way this was good for Jiro because it took attention away from his news about the increase in charcoal prices.

  As Kaze looked around, he realized that Suzaka was more like a buraku, a hamlet, than a mura, a real village. The buraku was a relatively small grouping of farmhouses, and groups of buraku would form a mura. Here in the mountains, the land could not sustain a large number of buraku.

  Now, with the sun down and the evening meal cooked, Jiro didn’t know what to expect from this samurai. He worried about what might happen, because he had never had a samurai stay in his farmhouse before. In fact, since his wife died, he rarely had people in his house at all. He fretted over possible scenarios in which the samurai would be demanding or threatening. He even thought the samurai might beat him because the fare he was offering was so meager. He would never have predicted that the samurai would actually thank him.

  “Chotto matte, kudasai. Wait a minute, please,” Jiro said. He hesitated a moment, then moved over to a corner of the platform. He lifted up one of the floorboards. The use of a metal nail or wooden pegs to hold them down would have been an unthinkable luxury. The floorboards were simply laid on the floor joist.

  Jiro reached under the board and lifted out a pottery jar with a piece of coarse cloth covering the mouth. Jiro removed the cloth and offered the jar to the samurai. “Tsukemono? Pickles?”

  The samurai peered into the jar and quickly jerked his head back as the pungent odor assaulted his nostrils, overpowering even the smell of smoke and the loamy smell of earth. Inside the jar were small eggplants and cabbage leaves fermented in bran and salt. He gingerly picked some of the pickles out of the jar with his hashi and nibbled at one.

  “Good, but powerful enough to kill flies.”

  Jiro laughed. “It’s my own recipe. It’s my secret to long life.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifty years.”

  Fifty years was positively ancient. Boys could see their first battle at twelve, people were often married at fourteen, and a woman past thirty-five could expect to be addressed as obaasan: grandmother. A peasant living through his forties was unusual. Kaze was thirty-one. He had lived through the dangerous year of twenty-nine, but that year had indeed been a fateful one, just as the folk belief said it would be. So much of his life had been lost or changed since then; he had no wish to catalog the changes. He dipped his hashi back into the pungent jar and fished out some more pickles.

  “The village looks run down,” Kaze said as he continued to eat small bites of pickle with his porridge.

  “It might as well be taken by devils,” Jiro answered.

  “Why?”

  Jiro’s wariness, temporarily dispelled by the samurai’s politeness, quickly returned.

  “Problems,” he said vaguely.

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Our District Lord is a little … strange.”

  “In what way?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m very ignorant. I shouldn’t talk of my betters.”

  “Why are you suddenly acting stupid when I can tell you’re an intelligent man?”

  Jiro bowed. “Please forgive me, but …” He let the sentence trail off. A clear sign he didn’t want to continue. Kaze turned his attention back to his porridge and didn’t press the charcoal seller.

  Jiro surreptitiously examined the man eating his food. Kaze was of normal height for a man of his time, which would make him five foot one or five foot two. From the swell of his forearms and the bulge of his shoulders under his kimono, Jiro could see that Kaze was very muscular, but he was also exceptionally agile, as Jiro had witnessed when Kaze came down the mountain to the crossroads. The samurai’s face was square-cut and had high cheekbones, with dark brows that almost met above the bridge of his nose. His face was burnt brown from the sun, the result of a long time on the road. Kaze didn’t shave the front part of his head as other samurai did. Instead he drew his glossy black hair back into a ponytail. Jiro decided this strange samurai was handsome.

  Despite an outwardly casual manner, one aspect of the samurai did bother Jiro. Kaze seemed to keep his sword close at hand at all times, as if he expected an attack at any moment. Jiro knew that samurai considered their swords to be extensions of their souls, but he found it strange that Kaze never had his sword far
ther away than a short stretch of his arm. He also found it strange that Kaze only carried one sword, the long katana. Samurai usually carried two swords, the long katana and the shorter wakizashi. The short wakizashi was used as an auxiliary weapon and for other tasks, such as ritual suicide. Samurai called the wakizashi the “guardian of honor.” Jiro wondered why Kaze didn’t carry one.

  After closing off any conversation about the Lord, Jiro tried to make amends through small talk. It was an effort for him, but he decided civility was the right tack to take with this particular samurai.

  “Have you been on the road long?”

  “Too long.”

  “Where is your home?”

  “I no longer have a home. I’m a ronin, a ‘wave man.’ Like the waves of the ocean, I call no land home. Like water on rocks, I can’t mix in and settle. I am always pulled back to flow to the next shore.”

  Jiro, who was not an articulate man, found this rush of words both peculiar and pleasing. The play off the meaning of “ronin” was something he could easily understand but which would have been beyond his power to invent. It gave him a feeling of both awe and sadness.

  “That’s good. I wish I could think like that.”

  “It’s true. I wish I had no reason to think like that.”

  Jiro had no response. He sucked air through his teeth, cocked his head to one side, and smiled. The samurai smiled back.

  “Tell me something,” Kaze said.

  “What?”

  “Are there many farmhouses outside the village?”

  “A few. No one lives in most of them. Too many bandits.”

  “Do you know the families that do live there?’

  “Yes.”

  “Have any bought a girl recently? She’d be around nine years old now. She would probably be sold as a servant. She might have a kimono with a mon, a family crest, of three plum blossoms.”