Year of the Demon

passed since then, and the experience still left an indelible impression on Daigoro’s young mind. Shiramatsu Shozaemon, Hideyoshi’s emissary, had come with a battalion at his back to chastise Daigoro’s brother, Ichiro, for showing hubris in his duels. It was not far wrong to say Ichiro died because he had failed to heed that advice.

Daigoro had always assumed that Shiramatsu arrived with a show of force in order to cow House Okuma into submission. The daimyo of Izu sometimes rode with an honor guard, but only on special occasions; usually a few bodyguards were protection enough. Shiramatsu Shozaemon had arrived with an entire battalion as his escort. At the time Daigoro had been duly impressed, but he’d never guessed at what the imperial regent himself might consider to be an appropriate bodyguard.

When Daigoro saw the first junk, he feared the worst. She was twice the size of any Izu fishing vessel. The kiri flowers on her enormous sails were as unmistakable as the samurai standing in formation on the deck or their spearheads glinting in the sun. There were dozens of them, and Daigoro had no illusions about whether they came in peace. Surely they’ve come for the abbot, he thought, and maybe for my head as well.

Little had Daigoro imagined that this was a small ship, little more than a sloop. The next ship to appear was one of the famed turtle ships. Daigoro had never seen one before, but there was no mistaking what it was. Scores of interlocking metal shields covered the entire deck in a gleaming shell. The fact that Daigoro could not see the deck only gave his imagination room to wander. How many troops were aboard? A hundred? More?

Izu was a land of high, blocky sea cliffs, stabbing out into the waves like huge black fingers. They made it impossible to see any real distance up or down the coast, and when the surf was high, pale clouds of spray hovered perpetually along the cliffs, further obscuring visibility. As such, a fleet that sailed near the coast appeared out of nowhere. Two turtle ships, then four, then eight. And then came the actual warship.

It was a floating castle. Her hull was like any other ship’s, save for its enormous size. But her decks were no decks at all. Instead, sheer wooden walls ascended from the hull, no less than five stories tall. Another two- story donjon towered above the main structure. The ship’s oars were like a centipede’s legs: spindly, moving in unison, impossible to count. Portholes formed a grid of dark squares on the castle walls, and Daigoro feared every last one of them might harbor one of the southern barbarians’ fabled cannons behind it. If so, she bore hundreds upon hundreds of cannon. Daigoro wondered whether there was enough iron in the world to cast that many.

As the castle ship drew nearer, it loomed so large that Daigoro wondered which was bigger, the ship or the entire Okuma compound. It took four anchors to moor her, each one the size of a warhorse. The launch she lowered to take her commander ashore looked like a pea pod compared to the warship herself, yet Daigoro counted no less than thirty-three armored men boarding the launch.

He wondered which one was Hideyoshi. Only one man was clearly visible from Daigoro’s vantage high up on the compound’s wall: a giant in glittering black yoroi, his topknot as white as snow. Too old to be a bodyguard, Daigoro thought. And too big to be the regent; rumor held him to be quite slight. Daigoro wondered whether the giant was one of the regent’s generals. He might even be this Shichio that was calling for the abbot’s head.

Daigoro watched as his own commanders greeted the landing party. He hadn’t gone down himself, for the regent’s arrival had come as a surprise. It would have taken Daigoro the better part of the morning to limp all the way down to the beach, and he hadn’t the time to gather a palanquin and crew to carry him down there. He’d sent his best officers instead, along with a platoon of spearmen. Even they must have been sweating in their armor after running down the whole way. Daigoro sympathized. The sweat was already running down his back and he hadn’t done anything but watch.

His anger felt like a wild animal trapped inside his body. It twitched frenetically in his neck and made it hard to speak. Why had he married his house to the Inoues if not to gain the benefit of their spy network? And how had the ubiquitous eyes and ears of House Inoue failed to notice a ship the size of an island, in the midst of an entire war fleet? Daigoro was going to have a talk with his father-in-law, and soon.

Akiko primped him as he set everyone else about their tasks: the cooks to their fires; the maids to their stations; runners into town to gather food for a welcome feast; still more runners to hire musicians and geisha; manservants to clear every last room in the compound save the audience chamber, in case the regent and his troops decided to spend the night; Tomo to oversee the entire operation. Finally and most importantly, he released Akiko to go and deal with his mother.

Daigoro wished he’d had more time; with a little advance notice he might have sent her to stay with Lord Yasuda or some other neighbor. As it was, the best idea he could come up with was to order Tomo to restrain her using any means shy of lethal force. But Akiko had a better idea. The lady of House Okuma was quite taken with her new daughter-in-law, and Akiko seemed to get on with her quite well. Akiko gave Daigoro a broad smile and kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ve got ribbons and balls for temari, hairpins and combs, everything two girls need to have fun.”

He watched her go, then looked back down to the beach. A second launch had landed with a bevy of palanquins aboard. The white-haired giant stepped into one of them. Two slender men stepped into another. Three more were occupied by quartets of men in varying uniforms, some armored, some not. Daigoro’s own commanders were offered the other four. Daigoro’s mind boggled at the thought of having four spare palanquins and four extra teams of bearers—and these on Toyotomi’s shipboard crew, to say nothing of his palace.

In no time at all the guests had arrived. Every last Okuma samurai had been marshaled into the honor guard. They lined the main courtyard, as still as the walls themselves. Daigoro recognized Shiramatsu Shozaemon when he emerged from his sedan chair along with three samurai in Toyotomi gold. He wore a silver kimono to match his silver hair, with a thin beard and a thinner mustache. His topknot was immaculate and his movements precise. He approached the center palanquin with short, measured steps, slid its door aside, and said, “You shall bow before the Imperial Regent, His Highness, the Chief Minister and great Lord General Toyotomi no Hideyoshi.”

All the Okuma samurai went to their knees, as did the regent’s own. Daigoro’s leg never allowed him to kneel easily, so instead he bowed deeply at the waist. “You will kneel now,” he heard Shiramatsu say, and looking up he saw the man’s withering glare. This was a very different Shiramatsu from the one who had come a year before. That man was unflappable. This one actually bared his teeth when he repeated his command.

“At ease,” said the little goggle-eyed man who hopped out of the palanquin. His armor was black, orange, and gold, and he was so skinny that it hung on him as if on a wooden armor stand. His cheekbones were too high, his chin too long. Against his willing it, Daigoro thought of the macaques one sometimes found in the mountains. It shamed him to liken this man to a monkey, but at least now the nickname Monkey King made sense. This could only be Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

“It’s his house,” said Hideyoshi. “Let him bow if he likes.” He shot Daigoro a conspiratorial smile. His teeth were sharp, misaligned, haphazardly spaced, like a seer’s chicken bones tossed on the ground and pointing in all different directions.

“Yes, my lord regent,” said Shiramatsu. “Most gracious of you. You may stand, Okuma-san.”

Hideyoshi paid Shiramatsu no mind at all. Instead he looked at the assembled Okuma samurai and then around the compound. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

Daigoro’s thoughts stumbled over each other like drunks. All his associations and inferences had missed the mark. When Shiramatsu had first come almost a year ago, Daigoro thought him to be a high-ranking emissary, one so important that he warranted a legion of bodyguards. Now he could see the truth, reflected in Hideyoshi’s relaxed stance and in his emissary’s obsequious gaze toward him. Shiramatsu was nothing more than a lickspittle. Hideyoshi had sent him with a battalion for the same reason he himself had come on the wings of an invasion fleet: to cow the Okumas into submission. And yet Hideyoshi was anything but intimidating. Now Daigoro thought not of mountain monkeys but of his father: approachable, even gentle, but a master at deploying his forces for just the right effect. Psychologically speaking, Hideyoshi had put Daigoro on his heels before he’d even set foot on shore.

Even so, Daigoro immediately understood why the abbot had referred to him as Hideyoshi, not as General Toyotomi. There was nothing lordly about this man. His shoulders were relaxed, his gait bouncy. He’d done a sloppy job of tying his topknot. He couldn’t have been much taller than Daigoro, who by anyone’s account was a pipsqueak. He was the imperial regent, the highest-ranking military officer in the land, and yet the cording on his