Jade Palace Vendetta (Samurai Mysteries) Read online

  “But it might take us days to get to the barrier that way,” the merchant protested.

  “Yes. But if the bandits catch us we won’t get to the barrier at all.”

  The merchant saw the logic in Kaze’s statement and said, “All right. I suggest we travel on this path a little way before we leave it. That way, even if the bandits surmise what we’ve done, it will still be harder for them to pick up our trail.”

  “Good,” Kaze said. He pointed at the cart.

  “You pull, I’ll push, and we’ll stop every fifty paces so I can go back and obliterate the cart tracks.”

  The merchant looked up at the heavens. “It’s raining a lot harder now.”

  “Yes,” Kaze said, “but raindrops won’t stop men in search of gold.”

  At a likely-looking place, he and Hishigawa pushed the cart off the path and started threading their way through the woods. At some junctures they had to take wide detours to avoid thick patches of brush that would have totally stopped the heavy cart. It was hard, exhausting work, and at one point the merchant almost collapsed from fatigue.

  “We can leave the cart here and take the chance that the bandits won’t find it,” Kaze said to the weary Hishigawa.

  “Leave the gold? Never! This gold belongs to Yuchan as well as me. I’ll never leave it.” The merchant was intransigent about abandoning the cart, but the thought of leaving a fortune seemed to add fire to his muscles, and he tugged at the cart handles with renewed vigor. Kaze insisted they stop and rest a bit. Both men sat silently on the cart, drenched by the rain and too tired to speak.

  Finally, Kaze got up and wordlessly took his position behind the cart. Also without words, a tired Hishigawa took up his position between the thick bamboo rails of the cart and started pulling as Kaze pushed.

  It was the end of the day by the time the two men came across another path. It seemed to go in the direction of the mountains and not toward the barrier, but Kaze knew they had to take it. The two of them couldn’t continue to manhandle the cart through the woods.

  The rain was coming down like spears blanketing a battlefield by the time they stopped for the night. Kaze had found a ridge near the path they were on and placed the cart so it straddled it. This had the advantage of making the water run down on each side of the ridge, providing a somewhat drier space under the cart. He was careful not to place the cart in a north-south direction. Corpses were laid out with their heads in the direction of the rat, or north, and he didn’t want to sleep in that position. Both men crawled under. They were exhausted, soaked, and cold.

  “This is intolerable!” Hishigawa said, pulling his kimono around him tightly. Water dripped down through the cracks in the cart floor, hitting him on the nose. He jerked his head away, hitting it on the inside of a wheel. “Damn!” he said in pain. “I’m going to get out of here and find some temple or peasant’s hut where I can get some shelter.”

  “Dozo. Please,” Kaze said. “Find some building nearby and hole up like an animal in a warm den. Soon the hunters will come to sniff you out. Don’t you think the bandits will search all nearby buildings first? You’ll be warm and dry until they capture you. And when they do, just don’t tell them where I am, no matter how much they torture you.”

  Kaze turned his back to the merchant and closed his eyes. He listened to the grumbling merchant for a few seconds to satisfy himself that Hishigawa was not leaving the meager shelter of the cart.

  “You said that bandit I killed was after you because of your wife,” Kaze said, his eyes closed.

  “That’s right,” Hishigawa responded.

  “Why?”

  Hishigawa smiled and closed his eyes, lost in reverie. “She is the most beautiful creature you can imagine. Exquisite skin, as white as a camellia and as silky smooth as the skin of a new persimmon. A mouth with lips as dark red as the most luscious plum. The nape of her neck is long, like a swan’s.” Hishigawa opened his eyes and looked out at the rain. “Even Yuchan’s hands are the most perfectly formed things you’ve ever seen,” he exclaimed. “Delicate, small, and extremely graceful in every movement she makes.”

  Kaze turned and looked at the merchant. He had a long, horsey face and baggy eyes. He hardly looked the part of a lovesick swain, but it was obvious that he was enchanted with his wife.

  Hishigawa’s hair was shaved like a samurai’s, and at one time his family had undoubtedly been samurai, which was why he affected two names. Commoners, including merchants, were supposed to have only one name; only samurai and nobles were supposed to have two.

  After the great battle of Sekigahara, fifty thousand ronin samurai were left without a use for their sword except mischief and banditry. More and more of these samurai, in despair and desperation, were taking their hand to different endeavors, such as farming and other occupations. Many were returning to the soil, maintaining farms. Two generations before, almost all samurai had been soldier-farmers. A professional class of warrior was a relatively recent development, spurred by the wars to unite Japan into a single country. From the looks of Hishigawa, however, the decision to follow the path of the merchant was not a recent one.

  Kaze had mixed feelings about the choice of becoming a merchant. As one of the lowest trades in the social class, the grubbing for money seemed somehow beneath the dignity of a warrior. Yet, he knew one of the foundations and strengths of the Tokugawas’ ascendancy was the legendary tightfistedness of Tokugawa Ieyasu.

  Ieyasu knew that money could be translated into men and arms and power, and he waited, biding his time and gathering his resources until the previous ruler of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, died, leaving a young son and a widow to try to protect his legacy.

  Then Ieyasu acted. He attacked the forces loyal to the Toyotomi at Sekigahara during the month that has no Gods. It was the largest battle ever fought by samurai.

  At the start of the battle, Ieyasu was outnumbered because his son had been diverted besieging a castle, and one-third of Ieyasu’s army was not on the field. But Ieyasu had two secret weapons: betrayal and greed. He used some of the money he had gathered over a lifetime to bribe forces on the side of the Toyotomi before the battle. They agreed to remain neutral or to turn on their allies in the heat of battle and fight on the Tokugawa side. Ieyasu started the battle seemingly outnumbered, but as the long day wore on, key Toyotomi forces would not attack when ordered to. At the critical moment of the battle, the disloyal troops under the command of Kobayakawa attacked their erstwhile allies. By the end of the battle, Ieyasu was the undisputed ruler of Japan.

  To Kaze, Ieyasu’s victory was based on promoting disloyalty. This lack of loyalty and honor struck at the very heart of bushido, the warrior’s code, the core of Kaze’s beliefs.

  Now Hideyoshi’s widow and son were trapped in Osaka Castle, not quite prisoners, but certainly not free. Ieyasu still paid perfunctory respect to them, but there was no doubt who the real ruler of Japan was. There was also no doubt that it was Ieyasu’s intention to declare himself Shogun.

  By tradition, only members of the Minamoto family, the same family that built the Tsurugaoka Shrine in Kamakura, dedicated to Hachiman, the God of War, could become Shogun. The Tokugawas had never been considered as Minamotos. Then, as Tokugawa Ieyasu’s power increased and becoming Shogun became a possibility, he suddenly “discovered” that his lineage was actually connected to the Minamotos, although no such link had been claimed before. So now Ieyasu was suddenly qualified to take the title of Shogun, and people loyal to the Toyotomi, such as Kaze, found themselves penniless. At the same time, people like Hishigawa, who had seen the trend in the new Japan and had capitalized on it, were able to wander the countryside with pushcarts holding a chest full of gold.

  “You must love your wife very much,” Kaze said.

  “It goes beyond love,” Hishigawa said. “It goes beyond passion and it goes beyond need. This woman is my life and my existence.”

  A poetic song from a mud frog, Kaze thought. Love can do amazing things. “Y
ou’ve been married a long time?”

  “No. Less than a year.”

  The newness of the marriage could explain the merchant’s infatuation, but Kaze was still surprised. It was not often that a Japanese man would find passion in his marriage. That’s what concubines, or perhaps young boys, were for.

  From the way Hishigawa was talking, it sounded like his marriage was one of those bonding of souls that sometimes occurs in life. This happened much less often in the warrior class than in other classes, because in the warrior class marriages were arranged according to economic and military advantage, with no regard for the feelings of the people actually involved.

  Kaze’s own marriage had been arranged this way—a dry alliance between Kaze’s family and the family of his bride. Although his marriage had been proper and respectful, it was not filled with love or passion. He did love the two children the marriage produced, and he grieved for their death much as he grieved for the loss of the Lady.

  Kaze had actually only seen his wife once before their wedding. The negotiations between his family and her family were handled by a go-between, and consideration was given to the political and economic consequences of the union, but scant attention was given to the state of Kaze’s heart, save for the fact that he found his new wife acceptable in appearance.

  After the marriage, he went through the process of adjustment and sexual accommodation with her, but it was not a relationship that grew to great affection and depth of spirit or passion. He had two children with her and his marriage was normal for a person of his station, with the exception that Kaze never took a concubine or male page for a lover. His taking a lover would have been perfectly acceptable to his wife, but Kaze didn’t choose to, keeping the reason in the secret recesses of his heart.

  All in all, his was an extremely proper samurai marriage. So proper that when the castle that he lived in fell in the immediate aftermath of the climactic battle of Sekigahara, Kaze’s wife killed her own children before taking a dagger and shoving it into her own throat to kill herself. This was done to spare the children and herself from humiliation and torture if they were captured alive.

  The Lady, the wife of Kaze’s Lord, did not kill her daughter when her castle fell. Kaze never asked her why, but he knew it was because she loved her daughter too dearly and could not bring herself to do what samurai tradition expected of her. She also didn’t kill herself, and Kaze knew this was also related to her daughter. If her daughter was alive, the Lady would also want to be alive, not for her own sake, but so she could fight for and try to protect her daughter. Kaze knew the Lady would not refuse to take her own life out of cowardice. He had seen enough examples of her courage to know that she would not hesitate to do what was required of her. But the love of her daughter changed the requirements of what was proper.

  It seemed strange to Kaze that the heart of this aging merchant should be so captivated by a new wife. Still, the Taiko himself, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had found satisfaction and passion with a new wife at the end of his life. And this new wife had given Hideyoshi a child. In fact, she had given Hideyoshi two children. When the first child died, a second was conceived and born—a son. Since Hideyoshi had a long-standing relationship with his first wife and at least a hundred concubines, there was endless speculation on how Yododono, the mother of the child, could have created such a miracle. The pious believed it was because Yododono had prayed to the proper gods. The cynical believed that Yododono had taken other means, or perhaps other men, to guarantee her conception. In either case, Hideyoshi believed the child to be his and tried to ensure his son would succeed him to the rulership of Japan.

  Now the child and his mother ruled only Osaka Castle and there was speculation that they would not be ruling that for long. Ieyasu continued to give proper respect to the memory of Hideyoshi, but his forces were gathering the threads of power and weaving them into a mighty and enveloping tapestry.

  Hishigawa remained quiet, perhaps still caught up in the memory of his wife. Soon Kaze heard snoring as the exhausted merchant fell into a deep sleep, despite the miserable conditions. Kaze focused on the sound of the falling raindrops hitting the cart and the ground around him, filtering out the man’s snores.

  Splat-splaaat-splat-splat-splaat. The rain was coming down harder now, hitting the earth in an irregular rhythm. It was a mesmerizing sound, and one that brought back memories that flooded Kaze’s mind like the water washing down the hillside.

  Kaze reflected on how strange it was that so many of his encounters with the Lady involved falling water.

  CHAPTER 5

  Falling water and

  falling tears. Both can cleanse and

  both can drown the soul.

  His very first glimpse of the Lady was when he was ten. He had been with his Sensei, his teacher, for about two years. Every time Kaze had thought he had mastered something that the Sensei had to teach him, the old man would suddenly increase the difficulty of the lesson with an effortless grace, which always left Kaze frustrated that he would never truly learn anything, even the most rudimentary thing.

  Once, when he expressed his feelings about this to his teacher, the old man had looked at him very seriously and said, “If you are going to follow the way of bushido, then you must learn throughout your entire life. After a while the mechanical things I can teach you will no longer be new, but in their application and feel they will always be new. The simplest parry with your sword—the very first one I taught you—will evolve through the years as you grow in skill and understanding. So even though the motions you make will be the same ones that you made when you were eight years old and started your lessons with me, throughout your entire life those motions will be ever changing, yet still the same. Thus it is with life—ever changing but still the same. Just as important, you must expand your circle of skills beyond the sword to art and literature and music. The true warrior is not just a killer. Remember the lesson of Yoshimori and the foxes.”

  Kaze looked puzzled.

  “The great warrior Yoshimori had a suit of exceptionally fine armor commissioned,” the Sensei continued. “Part of the process of creating this armor was the reinforcement of key points with fresh fox skin. The special glue used to attach these reinforcements took three days and nights of constant attention to prepare. Someone had to be stirring it continuously and minding the fire to make sure it did not get too hot. Three times the master armorer prepared this glue, but Yoshimori’s vassals could not supply a freshly killed fox whose skin could be used to finish the armor, so each time days of effort were wasted and the glue had to be thrown away.

  “In frustration the armorer complained to Yoshimori because he had to throw away three batches of glue after laboring over each of them for three days and three nights. Yoshimori immediately told the armorer to start another batch of glue because he was very anxious to have this new suit of armor. He said he would personally deliver a freshly killed fox to the armorer. He then took his bow and went alone into the hills above Kyoto hunting for foxes.

  “He hunted all day, trudging up and down hills in the hot sun, using his keen instincts to try to find the lair of a fox. Despite his best efforts, he could not find a fox, even though the hills around Kyoto are usually teeming with them. He returned that night puzzled and discouraged, determined to do better the next day.

  “The second day he went hunting again in a different area. Once again, after a hot day searching the hillsides, he could not find a fox. Yoshimori returned home empty-handed, and he knew that the special glue would be ready the next evening.

  “The third day, Yoshimori was up before dawn and scouring the hills. As on the previous days, he could find no trace of foxes, and he grew increasingly frustrated and anxious. As the sun dipped low on the horizon, he thought about how humiliated he would be if he did not make good on his promise to deliver a fresh fox skin to the armorer. Just as he was about to return home, a flash of brown caught his eye. Fitting an arrow to his bow, he stealthily crept towa
rd where he had seen what he thought to be a glimpse of a fox’s fur.

  “Suddenly, he came upon a family of foxes trapped and cowering under a rock. It was a male, a female, and a young kit. Yoshimori was pleased, because he would be able to have his pick of foxes now and have his armor completed. He would not suffer embarrassment because he could make good on his boast to provide a freshly killed fox skin to complete the armor. As he drew back his bow, he noticed that the male and female fox did not run away. Instead, they pressed in close to their tiny baby, protecting it from Yoshimori’s arrow.

  “As he saw this scene, he was moved to pity, for he thought that even these dumb creatures were acting with bravery, ready to sacrifice their own lives to protect their child. He lowered his bow and vowed to tell the armorer that he could not kill a fox on his hunting expedition, even though it would cost him great embarrassment to make such an admission. The armorer was so angry that he vowed not to finish the armor for Yoshimori, an unprecedented insult for a samurai to suffer at the hands of a tradesman.

  “Yet, despite the embarrassment, Yoshimori did the proper thing. He was not a wanton killer, but a complete warrior. He understood the difference between killing and murder. It is the warrior’s duty to kill or be killed, but only the outlaw or brute commits wanton murder, even of a simple creature like a fox. As you grow and mature you must strive to be a complete warrior, too. The natural result of our art, our gei, is death—either your death or your opponent’s. Yet this death must always be honorable and never simple murder. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” the Sensei asked.

  “I think so,” Kaze answered.

  “Good. I want you to meditate on that, but I want you to learn how to meditate while suffering distractions.” Saying that, the Sensei took him from where they had been talking to the foot of Dragonfly Falls.

  Dragonfly Falls was a small but beautiful waterfall near the Sensei’s hut in Kaze’s home prefecture. The waterfall tumbled the height of three men in a steady silver stream. It was framed by black volcanic rocks in a rugged cliff. Lush green ferns and trees surrounded the picturesque setting. The sound of the falling water made a refreshing music that eased the soul. It was a favorite diversion to pass by the waterfall when any traveler was in the neighborhood, and this diversion was shared by intense orange and bright blue dragonflies, who gave the falls its name. The insects seemed to share the pleasure of humans in loitering near the beauty of the falls.