Year of the Demon

anything to do with me?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I can’t even imagine.”

Katsushima’s wry smirk faded away. “How did we meet?”

“You dueled my brother.”

“And then?”

“You dueled me.”

“Almost,” said Katsushima. “We had tea first. Then dinner. Then we talked all night, at your insistence. ‘I want to discuss swordsmanship with you, and bushido as well.’ That’s what you said.”

Daigoro nodded. Even through the haze of fatigue, he could recall Katsushima’s response: I expect we have much to learn from each other.

“So let’s discuss,” Katsushima said. “Bushido demands that you fight even against impossible odds, neh?”

Daigoro nodded.

“To describe your odds of besting Shichio as ‘impossible’ seems blithely optimistic to me. Would you agree?”

Daigoro nodded. It was easier than talking; the jostling of his saddle did most of the work.

“So why not give up bushido? Following it is certain to kill you. You gave up your name. It only makes sense to free yourself of the rest.”

Daigoro nodded again—due more to the rocking motion of his horse than to his own agreement. But Katsushima wasn’t wrong either. Not entirely.

“A ronin keeps his swords and throws the rest aside,” Katsushima said. “Duty, family, lord, name, honor; they’re shackles. All you have to do is give up the shackles and you’ll be free.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You’ve already given up the ones you value most.”

“Yes,” Daigoro said. “I’ve surrendered my family and with them my name. I have no other lord—save Izu herself, perhaps, but without my title I’ve abandoned her too. With every sacrifice I feel I’ve done what honor demands, but my only reward is to be hunted like a traitor and a criminal. There’s no honor in that. I have no honor left.”

“Then what else remains?”

“Duty.”

“To whom?”

“To my father’s memory. To what little sense of family I still have left. To bushido itself.”

“Your father’s gone, Daigoro. When you gave up your name you gave up your family too. Why not shed the last of your shackles?”

It sounded so inviting. Done properly, it might even end the feud with Shichio. He could give up being samurai. Put down the burden of his father’s sword. Make an obsequious and public apology. Cut off his topknot and go home unmolested. Comfort his mother. Share Akiko’s bed. Be there for the birth of his child.

He could have had everything he wanted, and all he had to do was betray his code. “I can’t,” he said, near to tears. “I can’t give up duty. I don’t know how.”

“That is why I follow you.”

58

There was no shore party to greet him when Shichio made his landing at the Okuma jetty. In any other circumstances, failure to send an honor guard for the great Toyotomi no Hideyoshi might have got a daimyo and his family crucified. (Though not a convert to the southern barbarians’ religion, Hashiba found their religion’s obsession with crucifixion quite exotic. It had become his favorite method of execution.) But today the Okuma clan would receive a pardon, not because their honored guests had come unannounced—they should have seen Hashiba’s flagship from ten ri away—but because it was Shichio’s wedding day, and that had the regent feeling jovial.

The bile rose in Shichio’s throat when he remembered his last visit to this wretched place. He’d left the Okuma compound in disgrace, no thanks to that giant pig Mio. Shichio would have thought the fat man’s precious bushido code would have forbidden throwing a fight to a cripple.

Shichio supposed he owed the fat man a debt of gratitude. If it weren’t for his superhuman endurance—if he hadn’t survived long enough to reveal Shichio’s designs for marriage—the Bear Cub might never have approached the Wind, and then Shichio’s informant could never have betrayed the boy. He knew now that his assassin had failed; the absence of a second communique proved the first message was false. But it was enough just to learn that the boy had made contact with the Wind. Shichio had stepped up his wedding plans, while the Bear Cub must surely have gone to ground. That typhoon had forced even Hashiba’s flagship into port. No cripple could withstand it.

Shichio touched his hair, which was behaving peevishly in this all-pervading heat. He stepped out of the launch to walk side by side with Hashiba down the jetty toward the palanquin. Once inside, he carefully brushed all the sand from his fine silk stockings and smooth wooden sandals. There was little sand on the jetty to begin with, but Shichio would abide no imperfections on this perfect day.

As his palanquin rocked side to side with the footsteps of the bearers, Shichio looked out at the emerald tangle of kudzu strangling the black rocks. He wondered how long it would take him after the wedding to sell his new holdings and buy an estate in the Kansai. Only barbarians could make a permanent home in Izu. The humidity alone was reason enough to leave and never come back.

“What have you got in that scarf of yours?” Hashiba said, nodding at the little parcel Shichio unconsciously worked in his hands. It was wrapped in the finest Chinese silk, which did little to soften its horns, its teeth, its furrowed brow. Hashiba squinted at it, then laughed. “Well, I’m damned if I know what to get you for a wedding present. You name a gift that tops that mask and I’ll buy it.”

Shichio felt himself wince and quickly converted it into a coy smile. He couldn’t let Hashiba see how he’d come to fear the mask, and yet he hadn’t been able to leave the mask in their cabin, either. He wished he had. So long as they were behind closed doors, it was enough to let Hashiba ravage him. It wasn’t hard to tempt him into being a little rough. The mask would not be sated, but it could be distracted.

Shichio had wrapped it up in the hope that he could satisfy his unconscious need to hold it while avoiding the touch of its iron skin. He envied the mask; even in this heat, it would never sweat. He wanted nothing more than to disrobe it, to press its cool cheek against his own, but that was out of the question. This was no time to compromise self-control. He had a madwoman to bring to heel.

Seeing Hashiba’s expectant look, he said, “Gifts be damned. And let the wedding and the wife be damned too. Once I have her name, my mask and I come back home to serve their rightful lord.”

“Already thinking like a trueborn samurai,” Hashiba said with a wink. He smiled his impish, simian smile.

The palanquin’s woven bamboo window screens were no proof against the sweat-stink of the bearers, who grunted in time with each other as they plodded up the cliffside trail. “These commoners smell like animals,” Shichio said, grimacing. A tiny part of his mind insisted that the bearers’ parents probably worked a farm no different from the one Shichio had grown up on, but he would not dwell on that. Soon enough he would have rank, name, station, and esteem. He would be above the commoners for ever after.

At last the countless switchbacks took him to the top of the cliff trail, and through the window screen he could see the high white wall of the Okuma compound on his right. Soon to be my compound, he thought—very soon, in fact. That fact hung over him like the rain clouds he’d endured the day before, and so it was especially irksome to hear a runner coming from somewhere ahead. The man stopped to kneel beside the palanquin, panting like a horse. Delay after delay; it was the only way the lower classes could