Death at the Crossroads (10 page)

I
t was a quiet night as Kaze made his way from Manase’s villa to the nearby village of Suzaka. Leaving the villa had been absurdly simple. Manase posted a sentry, but Kaze found the sentry comfortably asleep, sitting on the ground and leaning back against a gatepost, announcing his slumbering status with a raucous snoring.

The mist that had painted the ground the first morning Kaze entered this district was back. It was a gossamer blanket that captured the faint light of the stars and the brighter light of the waxing moon, entangling both in the swirl of its ephemeral weave. Kaze cut through the undulating blanket, the passage of his feet tearing puffy-edged holes in the surface.

Kaze looked over his shoulder and sought the image of the rabbit in the moon that Japanese children were taught to look for. He could see the familiar ears and eyes, and he smiled in recognition. He stopped for a moment to look up between the flanking pines to glory in the wave of stars that crested over the treetops and flooded the heavens. Nowhere did the stars seem so close and attainable as they did in the mountains. Kaze’s curious mind wondered why the stars seemed so flat and dull in cities like Kyoto.

The trees that bordered the path to the village meant that Kaze had no worries about losing his way in the dark. Besides, with the instinct that all people close to nature must develop, he knew the general direction to the village even without the trees to guide him. He started off again, enjoying the journey.

The night had an unnatural stillness to it, a trait Kaze had noticed before when conditions were like this. It was as if the damp air smothered the normal sounds of the forest, leaving a void in the air waiting to be filled. As he walked, that stillness was pricked by a sound so faint he had to stop to make sure he actually heard something. It was from up ahead, where the road curved so Kaze couldn’t see what was hidden beyond the corner. He still couldn’t make out what it was, but there was most definitely a sound.

Kaze reached down and smoothly loosened his sword, the sword moving past the sticking point that kept it firmly in the scabbard with a satisfying click. Walking silently, Kaze approached the corner that was flanked by dark trees. As he came to the curve in the road, he was able to comprehend the sound he had heard. It was a woman crying. Curious, Kaze rounded the corner to see what was ahead of him.

There, crouched down in the middle of the road, was a high-born woman wearing a white kimono, the color of death and mourning. Kaze could easily tell her station in life from her long hair and the cut of her kimono. Her face was buried in her hands, and her hair cascaded down around her shoulders. Kaze could hear most definitely that she was sobbing. Through a trick of starlight, the form of the woman seemed almost as misty and ephemeral as the silver blanket covering the ground around her, and Kaze rubbed his eyes because the edges of the woman seemed to blur into the night. Kaze’s eyes were especially acute, so the shifting shape of the woman made him uneasy.

He walked toward her slowly, his eyes trying unsuccessfully to focus on the form before him. Because of her eerie luminescence, he
was able to make out her shape easily, and there was something so familiar about the slope of her shoulders and the way her head was bent forward that Kaze stopped walking.

He opened his mouth to speak, but his mouth was dry, and only a soft whisper emerged. The woman apparently didn’t hear him, for she made no change in her posture. The dryness of his throat surprised him, and he suddenly realized that a chill had taken hold of his bones unlike any cold he had experienced before. It was a dry, inward chill that was so intense that Kaze found himself trembling from it.

Kaze took a deep breath, and the air around him tasted dry and flat, like the dead air in an old abandoned monastery or barn. He studied the shifting shape of the woman once more and, with an awful certainty, he knew who was before him.

“My heart has no hindrance,” Kaze said to himself, reciting the
Heart Sutra
. “No hindrance, and therefore no fear.” He took another gulp of that dead, flat air and, repeating the
Sutra
to himself, he called upon his courage and approached the woman.

Stopping a few feet from the figure, he bowed deeply, keeping his back straight. “I am here, Lady,” Kaze said, greeting the obake, the ghost, of his dead mistress. The obake ceased her sobbing, and Kaze took this as a sign that he could straighten his bow. The figure before him still had her face in her hands, and Kaze was at a loss about what to do next. Suddenly, the figure looked up and removed the hands from her face. Kaze’s soul froze.

Instead of the serene face of his dead Lady, the same face he carved on the Kannons he habitually left behind him, he saw that the obake was faceless. No eyes, no nose, and no mouth; just a soft lump of flesh. Yet, even without a face, he heard her sobbing and he saw the drops from wet tears glistening on her kimono.

Kaze stood motionless before the apparition, not daring to breathe. A fear more real than any he had known gripped his heart, yet he stood his ground and didn’t flee. No hindrance, and therefore no fear, he told himself. No hindrance, and therefore no fear. This
obake was the spirit of the Lady, someone he served when she lived, and someone he still served through his searching, even though she was dead. There is no reason to fear her now, even though she was a faceless entity.

“How can I help you, Lady?” Kaze said, summoning up all his courage. He was pleased that his voice sounded more normal than before.

The obake unfolded from the ground, rising like a puff of white smoke until it was standing before Kaze. It raised a hand in a languid motion, the arm floating upward gently until it pointed down the road.

“You want me to go with you?” Kaze asked, his heart chilling at the possibilities.

The obake continued to point down the road.

“There’s something down the road?”

The obake remained motionless.

“You want me to leave?”

The apparition lowered its arm.

Kaze sighed, a gripping anxiety replacing fear. He dropped to his knees and bowed before the obake, his head cutting through the low-lying mist and touching the earth. It somehow felt comforting to be so close to the damp ground in the presence of the obake, and the contact with the planet gave Kaze the courage to go on. “I know you want me to find your daughter,” he said. “Please excuse my lack of attention to my pledge! But Lady, something is very wrong here. The Lord I served, the man you were married to, always taught that it was our duty to maintain harmony within ourselves and in our society. That harmony has been destroyed here. All of Japan is in upheaval as the Tokugawas impose their will, but I feel there is some chance for me to restore harmony to this little piece of Yamato. I don’t know the cause of the disharmony, and I don’t know if I can correct it, but Lady, I would like to try. If I fail within a few days, I will continue my search. But for now, my Lady, please let me try!”

Kaze remained motionless, waiting for some sign from the obake
that his request was granted or denied. The stillness that surrounded him was suddenly broken by the sound of a cricket in the woods. Kaze looked up, and the obake was gone.

Kaze tried to stand and couldn’t. His heart was tripping in his chest and his body felt weak, as if he had a three-week fever. The air now tasted damp, but alive. He noted with wonder that the mist, which covered the ground, was rapidly shrinking into the earth, flowing into ripples and crevices and tiny folds as if it were water. He closed his eyes, centering himself and willing the chilling numbness of fear away. No hindrance, and therefore no fear.

Soon his breathing became slow and rhythmic, and the weakness in his limbs was replaced by growing strength. He stood, adjusting his sword in his sash. Then, with a firm step, he started off down the path to the village.

Kaze felt guilty about pausing in his search for the child to try to free the charcoal seller, but he now knew the Lady understood and was giving him permission to try to find harmony for this village. He wondered about the demon seen in the next village and wondered if this place was unusually active with spirits.

From his earlier exploration he knew the village layout. It was a compact collection of huts and farmhouses holding perhaps two hundred people. Like most villages of its size, it was organized alongside a dusty main street, with huts and houses flanking the street.

Kaze stood at the edge of the village, still calming himself and also enjoying the calm while he could. Behind him, in the woods, he could hear the song of a nightingale. It comforted him, and he tried to focus his attention on what he was about to do, not what he had just experienced. Then he took a deep breath and took his sword and scabbard out of his sash. Holding the sword in the middle of the scabbard, he ran to the door of the first hut in the village.

“Wake up! The bandits are attacking!” Kaze used the butt of the scabbard to bang on the house door.

“Nani? What?” a sleepy voice from within the hut called out.

“The bandits! They’re attacking.
Hayaku! Hayaku!
Hurry! Hurry! Grab a weapon and come out here!”

Kaze ran across the street to the next hut. He started pounding on the door.

“Wake up! Wake up! Bandits are attacking the village! Grab your weapons and come outside!”

Without waiting for an answer, he ran back across the street to the next house in line. There he repeated his warning and ran to the next house. As he zigzagged across the street he noticed the men of the village tumbling out of their homes onto the main street. A few carried newly lit torches, and in the flickering yellow light Kaze could see that all were carrying weapons of some type. As he progressed through the village the crowd in the main street grew larger and more confused.

“What—”

“Where’s the bandits?”

“What’s going on?”

“Are they attacking?”

“Where’s the attack?”

Kaze looped around to catch the village houses that weren’t on the main street. By the time he finished his circuit of the village, a large crowd of men and women were huddled together in the center, milling around, clutching weapons, and looking nervously into the dark.

Puffing from his exertions, Kaze strode into the mass of people and started pushing his way though the crowd.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s that samurai who was at Jiro’s. …”

“Where’s the bandits, samurai?”

As Kaze shouldered his way through the forest of people before him, he looked at the weapons they were holding. A few clutched farm implements, but most had spears, swords, and naginatas. He made his way through the milling group, ignoring all questions, until
he reached the center of the crowd and saw a pudgy hand holding a bow. He walked up to the owner of the hand and confronted the sweating face of the Magistrate.

“S-s-see here, s-s-s-samurai, w-w-w-what’s going on?” The Magistrate stuttered in fear.

Kaze saw a handful of arrows in the Magistrate’s other hand and pulled one out of the man’s shaking fist. The remaining arrows tumbled to the ground. Kaze walked over to a man with a torch and studied the arrow in the flickering light.

“W-w-what’s going on? Here, here, answer me!” the Magistrate demanded.

Kaze finished his inspection of the arrow, then looked around the crowd slowly to make sure there wasn’t another man with a bow that he missed.

“T-t-tell me!” the Magistrate commanded.

Kaze raised one hand in the air to quiet the crowd.

“People of Suzaka village!” Kaze shouted. The milling group immediately hushed. Kaze looked at the concerned faces around him, then said, “Superb! Your courage and martial manner have driven away the bandits that were planning to attack this village.
Omedeto!
Congratulations!”

Kaze started marching off, and the crowd opened up before him like the tall grass of summer falling away when you walk through an open field. As he made his way back to the manor, Kaze could hear the buzz of an excited village receding behind him.

The peasants milled about, discussing the possibility that the new samurai was mad. Some thought that perhaps the samurai was right and that they had scared off an attack by brigands, but others scoffed at the notion that Boss Kuemon or any other brigand would be scared by any group of peasant rabble. As the excitement of the novel night wore off, groups of peasants started drifting back to their homes.

Ichiro, the village headman, was one of the last to leave. Shaking his head over what the samurai was up to, he wearily went back to his house, where his wife and children had gone back to sleep long
before. He placed his naginata in the corner of the main room of the house and looked at it speculatively for a few minutes. Then he went to a corner of the room and moved several bales of rice, clearing a section of the floor. He removed several of the loose floorboards and dug down into the earth, removing an old section of matting that had been covered with dirt as camouflage. Underneath was a shallow hole, lined with old rice-stalk mats.

Ichiro got a twig from the kindling stack and lit it from the still-smoldering charcoal in the hearth. Using it like a crude candle, he examined the contents of his secret cache. In the flickering orange light, the oil on the weapons gleamed with a malevolent sheen. Two swords, a dagger, and a bow were nestled together in the shallow depression. Ichiro took the dagger from his forbidden armory and replaced the mat.

T
he next morning, Kaze was escorted into Manase’s presence. Kaze had found his own clothes, newly cleaned, starched, and resewn, waiting for him when he got up, and this was what he was wearing.

Manase was once again dressed in several sumptuous robes, forming a layered collection of color. He was sitting on a small veranda, looking over a garden of large rocks and shrubs. Kaze knew that in Heian Japan, the time of
The Tale of Genji
, the refinement of a woman was judged by how she layered her many multicolored kimonos. The delicacy of color, the transition of one color and pattern to the next, and the careful sculpting of overlapping pieces of cloth were all signs of sensitivity and refinement. He wondered if the same applied to a man, because Manase’s robes were all carefully layered and arranged to present a pleasing cascade of color.

“I understand you caused an annoying commotion in the village last night,” Manase said, without turning to look at Kaze.

Kaze gave a deep bow, even though Manase was not looking. “I apologize for disturbing the tranquillity of your District,” Kaze said, “but I wanted to see the weapons the peasants had. Sounding the alarm was one way to see those weapons without engaging in a tedious
search. A warrior always grabs the weapon he’s most comfortable with when he’s put in sudden danger.”

Manase gave his high-pitched laugh. “How clever! You are a highly entertaining man. What did you find?” Manase asked when he stopped laughing.

“The only person in the village who grabbed a bow was the Magistrate.”

Manase turned around and gave Kaze a look of surprise that was magnified by the false eyebrows painted high on his forehead. “You think the Magistrate killed that traveling merchant?”

“I don’t know. The arrows used by the Magistrate were not the same as the arrow in the man at the crossroads. That arrow had a dark shaft and unusually fine fletching of gray goose feathers. The Magistrate’s arrows were crude things by comparison. Perhaps bandits did kill that man, and they were disturbed before they could rob him. I just don’t know why they would bother to dump the body at the crossroads.”

“So now you think bandits killed that merchant?”

“He wasn’t a merchant.”

“What?”

“The murdered man was a samurai.” The death of a samurai was much more serious than the death of any merchant. Merchants were actually in one of the lowest social classes. Only the
eta
, outcasts who handled unclean things like slaughtering animals and tanning hides, were lower on the social strata than merchants.

“How do you know he was a samurai?” Manase demanded.

“His sash was tied to hold two swords. I pointed out the sash to the Magistrate, but he either couldn’t see that or refused to see it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. The sash was loose where the two swords fit.”

“But I was told the dead man looked like a merchant.”

“I don’t shave my head, so without my sword I would also look like a traveler or merchant of some kind and not a samurai,” Kaze
pointed out. Samurai typically shaved the front part of their heads, letting the rest of their hair grow long. The long hair was gathered and greased into a topknot, held in place by a dark cord. Kaze’s hair was left to grow and gathered in the back, but he did not shave the front part because of the inconvenience and the expense.

Manase seemed to muse to himself, “How interesting. A samurai was killed. And you think it may be my own Magistrate who is the murderer.”

“I’m not sure who the murderer is, Lord Manase. It could also be the bandits.”

“But surely bandits wouldn’t attack a samurai.”

“They attacked me.”

“What? When?”

“The other day. I walked to Higashi village, and three bandits attacked me on the road.”

“What happened?”

“Two bandits stopped me on the road, and a third tried to sneak up behind me to kill me. The murdered man was shot in the back, so maybe bandits tried the same ruse with him, only they were successful.”

“How did you escape the bandits?”

“I didn’t escape. I killed two. The third was young, so I let him escape me.”

“You killed two of them?”

“Yes. I buried them by the side of the road, because I was told that was the custom in this District.”

Manase pulled a fan from the sleeve of his kimono and started waving it briskly. “Oh, this is all too much for me,” he confessed. “Since it was a samurai killed, we of course must make a better investigation of the circumstances of his death. How can you tell if it was the Magistrate or the bandits who killed him?”

“I’ll try to find out more about the bandits, to see if they use bows in their attacks.”

Manase snapped the fan shut. “Please continue your investigations,
Matsuyama-
san
. I’m not a cruel or unreasonable man. If you can bring evidence to me that someone else murdered that man at the crossroads, I won’t crucify the charcoal seller. In the meantime, I’ll keep the peasant safe here, enjoying my hospitality.”

“You can help by assigning some men to assist me in finding the bandit camp,” Kaze said. “That would make the search go faster.”

“All right,” Manase said. “I’ll order the Magistrate to put together a search party to help you.”

T
he next morning Kaze was shaking his head in disbelief. “These are the troops?” He looked at the ragtag band of militia before him. He expected professional warriors and instead he got armed peasants.

“Here, here, I thought we were just going to find the bandit camp, not fight them,” Nagato said. “These men will be fine for just finding it.” The Magistrate had come to the gathering point on a horse, but the thick forest ahead meant he would have to walk from here. Across his back was a quiver, and in his hand was the bow that Kaze had seen when he had rousted out the village.

Kaze was still skeptical, but the point of the search was to locate the camp, not destroy it, so he had to admit grudgingly that Nagato might be right. “Fine,” he conceded, “What direction do we search first?”

“North,” Nagato said quickly.

“Is that the direction we’re most likely to find the camp?”

“Yes.”

Kaze, not knowing the local geography, decided to go along with the Magistrate. If he was wrong, there would be time to search in other directions later. “All right,” Kaze answered.

“Good, good,” the Magistrate said. “You men form a line, but stay within shouting distance. We’ll start north and continue until midday. The bandit camp can’t be farther than a half day away. If we haven’t found it by then, we’ll return here.”

And search another direction tomorrow, Kaze silently added.

“Where are you going to be?” Kaze asked the Magistrate.

“I will be on the right wing. You take the left wing.” Normally the leaders would be in the center of a formation of men, but if the Magistrate wanted to try “the double-headed blossom” formation, where two leaders were on the wings, it didn’t bother Kaze.

“
Yosh!
Let’s do it!” Kaze said, walking to the left so he could take up his position.

The men strung out in a long line, with Kaze at one end and Nagato at the other. There was a large gap between each pair of men so the search party could cover as much ground as possible. With the distance between them and the obscuring brush and trees, each man could see only one or at most two others on each side of him.

Kaze started forward, glimpsing the searcher to his right occasionally when the trees thinned out or when he was on a small hill. The day was sunny and the last residual heat of a humid summer clung to the trunks of trees, making the air thick and still. The heavy underbrush made progress difficult, and occasionally Kaze had to make a detour to keep moving forward. He soon lost sight of the searcher to the right. He was farther than hailing distance, but he had no intention of shouting if he found any sign of the bandits anyway. With this group of peasant militia, he didn’t want to alert the bandits or get into a fight with them.

He kept his eyes open for the signs of a path or some other indication that humans were in the area. Thus far he had seen nothing of interest, except that a bamboo forest was growing to his left, encroaching on the territory of the pines and cryptomeria. Even in nature, there are wars for territory, Kaze thought.

Because of the heat, he paused for a moment, sitting on the large gnarled root of a tree to rest. He pulled a small earthenware bottle from his sash and took out the peg that sealed the top. He tilted his head back to pour cool water into his mouth when he heard the familiar whistling sound of an arrow in flight. Kaze had been in battles where the sky was black with deadly shafts, and he knew that sound.

Not pausing, Kaze simply tumbled backward off the root of the
tree, falling behind it as the arrow struck the trunk with a solid thunk. Kaze had no time to see how close the arrow would have come, because from the woods there came a lusty shout from the throats of many men. From the undergrowth a dozen men emerged, all dressed in stolen cast-offs like the bandits he had met on the road. They brandished spears and swords, and their headlong charge would converge on Kaze’s position in just a few moments. Kaze rolled to his feet and started running. He had been ambushed.

Kaze drew his sword. He was sure he would have heard that large a group of men getting into position, so they had been waiting for him. He had been set on a path designed to have him run into them. What he didn’t know was who had betrayed him: the Magistrate, Lord Manase, or someone else.

In an instant he was out of the pine forest and running into the bamboo forest. The stalks of bamboo were as big around as a man’s arm, and the floor of the forest was littered with the nubs of bamboo shoots and slippery leaves. Kaze dodged through the stalks, darting right, then left, feeling the shiny bamboo stalks graze his shoulders as he made his way through the wild growth. In the thick growth he could never see more than a few feet before him, so he didn’t bother checking over his shoulder for his pursuers. He didn’t need to, because he heard the shouts of his attackers growing progressively fainter behind him. He was outdistancing them.

Suddenly he burst out the bamboo forest and saw the earth drop away before him. He tried to come to a rapid halt, but the slippery bamboo leaves clogging the ground made his feet fly out from under him and he skidded over the edge of a precipice. He dropped his sword before it could go flying over the edge and clawed at the lip of the crevasse. He risked a quick look down and saw that he was hanging from the edge of a fissure formed by some past earthquake. Below him the bottom of the fissure was a great distance, and the rocky floor looked uninviting and dangerous.

Willing his fingers to dig into the hard earth at the edge of the crevasse, he hung there for a few long moments, uncertain if his grip
on the edge would save him or if the earth would give way, sending him to the bottom. It held.

Pulling himself back onto the bank, Kaze heard the shouts of the approaching men. The ambush had been carefully planned. Kaze was now trapped on the edge of a tear in the earth that was too wide to jump, with his attackers about to burst upon him in a few seconds. Kaze picked up his sword and made a quick decision.

He positioned himself next to a bamboo stalk growing at the edge of the fissure and drew his sword back with both hands. In his mind, he pictured the sword on the other side of the bamboo stalk, cleanly cutting it. He brought the sword down with authority and made his mental image of the completion of the stroke a reality. The stalk was now cleanly cleaved, and it fell forward, spanning the fissure with a narrow bridge, no wider than a man’s arm.

The stalk was glossy, smooth, and slippery and looked too thin to cross on. Kaze was reminded of an acrobat he had once seen, who walked across a stretched rope using a bamboo and paper umbrella for balance. Kaze had superb balance, but he wasn’t sure he could negotiate this thin and tenuous bridge. The voices of the men chasing him were near, and it seemed he had no option.

Taking a deep breath and holding his sword out for balance, Kaze started running on the stalk to cross the ravine. The flexible bamboo shaft bowed dangerously when he got to the middle, causing Kaze to momentarily lose his balance, teetering on the edge as the rocky floor of the fissure waited for him. He fought to control both his mind and body, centering himself literally and figuratively, pulling himself back upright on the fragile bridge. Wishing he were barefoot instead of in sandals so his feet could get a better purchase, Kaze made his way up the sloping bow of the bamboo and onto the other side. With a quick, one-handed swipe of the sword, Kaze cut the thin top of the bamboo, causing the stalk to fall into the fissure, eliminating the possibility that anyone, no matter how foolish or skilled, would follow him across. In an instant, he stood in the bamboo growing on the other side of the chasm.

Kaze’s pursuers came to the edge of the fissure, but since they knew of its existence, they had slowed their pursuit and didn’t fall over its edge. They scanned the bottom of the chasm to see if they could find Kaze’s body, but noticed nothing. Puzzled, they concluded that Kaze must have somehow eluded them in the bamboo forest. They turned around and formed a search party of their own to see if they could locate him.

As they did this, Kaze was already walking near the bank of the fissure, looking for a place where he could climb down into the chasm and climb up the other side. He was more interested in seeing the arrow that precipitated the ambush than in completely eluding the men.

After a great deal of searching, he found a place where he could climb down one side of the fissure and back up the other. When he finally made his way back to the location of the ambush, the sun was starting to move toward the horizon. Kaze was careful in his movements, taking time to assure himself that he wouldn’t stumble into another trap. When he finally came to the tree where he had stopped for water, he waited in hiding for several minutes to make sure the way was clear. He was glad he did.