Kill the Shogun (9 page)

This delay allowed the first pursuer to catch him. Kaze caught the pursuer’s blow on his blade, and his tabi-covered foot slipped, making it impossible for Kaze to immediately counterattack. Another man might have cursed this situation, but Kaze simply shifted his stance so his weight was primarily on his bare foot, which had much better purchase on the slippery slope.

His opponent was well trained and disciplined, the hallmark of a good swordsman. Kaze parried two of his cuts, but the other swordsman wasn’t trying to press his advantage. Kaze realized that his opponent didn’t have to. All he had to do was hold Kaze in place until his comrades arrived or a musketeer could get a shot from the ground. Despite his lack of a firm stance, Kaze went on the attack.

The other swordsman parried two of Kaze’s cuts, but not the third. Kaze’s sword caught him on the side of the neck, and the man fell to the roof, sliding to the edge, almost taking Kaze with him as he tumbled over.

Kaze still wanted to remove the other tabi sock, but he had no time. The next man out of the window was over the roof’s peak and upon him. This man wasn’t as disciplined or as good a swordsman as the first. Kaze dodged his cut and brought his own blade down across the man’s forearm, slicing it in two. The man
was holding his sword in two hands, and he looked down with surprise as suddenly he was holding it with one. He saw the severed arm hit the roof and a look of befuddlement passed across his face, the shock, pain, and reality of the situation not yet registering.

Not waiting to see the man’s reaction, Kaze immediately ripped off the other tabi and started running across the roof. The merchant’s house was so close to his neighbor’s that Kaze was able to easily step from one roof to the other without breaking stride. Behind him, he could hear shouts and running feet.

At the end of this roof, Kaze had to make a short leap to cover the distance across a side street. As he did so, he heard the crack of a musket firing. Kaze didn’t feel the ball whistle past, but he knew the shot was aimed at him. On the next roof, he changed direction, jumping to a roof behind the house he was running on. He looked over his shoulder and saw at least three samurai in pursuit. He knew that was just the vanguard and that there would be others.

He ran up the slope of the new roof and over the peak. He cut to the left and started running again. Behind him he heard one of his pursuers crest the roof and start after him. With sandals on, however, his pursuer didn’t make the change in direction in time, and he skidded off the roof, falling down to the street below with a yell. Probably not high enough to kill a man, Kaze thought, but the fall certainly resulted in broken bones.

Kaze ran across three more roofs. Though he could keep ahead of the men pursuing him across the rooftops, he couldn’t run faster on the uneven and steep roofs of Edo than the men pursuing him on the ground. As he changed directions, the men on the ground fanned out, searching for him. Sometimes his pursuers on the rooftops shouted directions to the men on the ground, and sometimes the men on the ground directed the pursuers on the
roof. Occasionally, a musketeer on the ground fired a shot at him, but none of the shots came close, and they may have been fired more as a signal to the other men of Kaze’s location than as an attempt to hit him.

As Kaze ran, he tried to anticipate an end game, and none of the possibilities looked good. With the number of men pursuing him, he couldn’t fight them. Even if he killed several of them, there were more to replace them. He could open one of the occasional attic windows, like the one in his room, but then he was likely to be trapped between the pursuers on the roof and the pursuers on the ground: not a pleasant alternative. Lacking a better plan, he continued to cross the rooftops, leaping the gaps between roofs, pulling ahead of the pursuers behind him, but not outdistancing the ones on the ground.

He came to the end of a string of three roofs and recognized where he was. Ahead of him, across the gap of a major street, were warehouses lined up along one of the many canals that cut through Edo. Kaze stood and looked at the gap ahead of him. The distance was long, and he was winded. He put his sword in its scabbard, looked over his shoulder at the men chasing him, and risked running backward, so he would have a running start at the leap. He stopped, and just as the first of his pursuers had almost caught him, he started running forward again, this time at full speed, toward the wide chasm between the roof he was on and a roof on the other side of the wide street.

He reached the end of the roof and launched himself into space, flinging himself into the nighttime void, stretching forward to bridge the gap between the two roofs. He flew through the air, sustained only by his determination to elude his pursuers. He landed on the edge of the other roof hard, the impact knocking the wind out of him as he skidded across the tiles.

Behind him, he heard one of his pursuers yell, “I’ll get him!
Make sure the men on the ground surround the warehouses.”

Kaze looked over his shoulder and saw one of the pursuers running toward the gap. The man launched himself into space as Kaze had done, intending to clear the street and reach the safety of the warehouse roof. But Kaze was barefoot and wearing a kimono. This man had sandals on, and he had the extra weight of a helmet and armored jacket. He fell short of the roof, one hand barely reaching the roof’s edge and grabbing desperately at a tile. The tile was yanked out of its mud base and the man, still clutching the tile, fell to the ground with a thud. Out of instinct, Kaze peeked over the edge of the warehouse and looked down at the body crumpled on the street below. It lay very still.

The pursuers on the ground reached the scene and two of them, in the red glow of the fuses on the matchlock muskets, stopped and took aim. Kaze withdrew his head from the roof’s edge as the muskets fired. This time the shots were close enough for Kaze to hear the lead balls whizzing by.

Still gasping for air, Kaze crossed the roof to get near the canal side. He reached there, looked down, and realized that there was a street even wider than the one he had jumped between the warehouse and the dark waters of the canal. With the wind knocked out of him, Kaze couldn’t make another long jump at that moment, and he lay back on the roof, staying out of sight and trying to regain his breath.

Below, he heard the noise of men as they surrounded the warehouse. In a few seconds, he heard the clatter of a horse arriving on the scene. Obviously, the officer in charge.

“Where is he?”

“He’s up there on the roof, sir!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, we have men on the roof on the opposite side so he can’t go back, and all four sides of the warehouse are surrounded.”

“Can we get men on that roof?”

“Apparently not, sir. Kojima tried jumping it from the other side and fell. He’s hurt pretty bad—”

“Yakamashii! Shut up! I don’t want a health report when all you men couldn’t trap one lone ronin. Just get a party of men into that warehouse and see if there’s any way to the roof. Bust the door down if you have to. You and you! Go to the nearest fire station and get their ladders. Bring them here and we’ll send men up to the roof from two different sides. And you! Get me my gun. I’ll guard the canal side of the building. Go around the entire building and make sure the other musketeers are spread out and ready, in case he shows himself. Is that clear?”

Several voices shouted, “Hai! Yes!” Then Kaze heard the sound of running feet.

Kaze was impressed. Whoever was in charge of the operation was a good officer. In a few minutes, the officer’s efficient planning would soon flush him out from the warehouse roof, one way or another. Kaze decided he would be flushed out in the best way possible for him, and not in the ways the officer had planned.

With the musketeers set and ready, there was a good chance he would be hit when he tried to jump to the canal. He shrugged one arm out of his kimono sleeve and crawled to the edge of the roof. He took the scabbard out of his sash and stuck the tip into the loose sleeve. He started lifting the sleeve slowly. In the dark of the night, the black mass of the sleeve would look like someone peering over the edge of the roof. Kaze had barely gotten the sleeve raised when there was the crack of a gun. He was surprised to feel the tug on his scabbard as the cloth of his sleeve was shoved back. At the report of the first gun, two other muskets at other sides of the building were fired, out of sheer nervousness and tension, because it was impossible for the musketeers to see anything.

Kaze now had a few seconds before the muskets could be reloaded.
He jumped to his feet and took a quick look down. A man in an officer’s helmet was furiously reloading his musket. Holding his sword in one hand and the scabbard in the other, he summoned all his strength, took two quick steps, and jumped into space.

T
he officer was sure he hit the figure on the roof, so he was surprised when his quarry jumped up before the echoes of the musket died down. He was even more surprised as the man jumped off the roof. Sword and scabbard in each hand, with one sleeve of his kimono flapping behind him, the man looked like a
tengu
, a quarrelsome creature that was half man and half bird, and able to fly.

While reloading his musket, he followed the arc of the man’s jump as he sailed over his head toward the canal. The man made it to the canal water with no distance to spare, entering the black water with a tremendous splash that threw water high past the edge of the canal. The water caught the pale moonlight, transmuting it from black to silver as it sparkled in the air.

The officer finished loading his gun and ran to the edge of the canal. He couldn’t see the man, but he fired into the center of the splash, hoping to hit him. In seconds, other musketeers had run up to the canal’s edge, and a ragged volley of shots pierced the blackness.

Some of the men ran down the canal to a bridge, crossed over, and lined the opposite bank. All the men were observing the dark water, waiting to see a head pop up. The officer reloaded his musket and waited along with the rest, hopeful to get another shot at the ronin. Even against the darkness of the water, he was confident he would hit the man’s head as soon as it broke the surface.

But it didn’t break the surface.

After many long minutes, the officer wondered if his shots or one of the other shots had killed the man after he entered the water. He ordered torches brought, and he told his men to secure boats and long poles, so they could probe the murky waters of the canal to see if they could find the ronin’s body.

A piece of bamboo,
small finger holes, a soft breath,
and divine music.

T
his is a disaster,” Hanzo said.

“Well, it was your idea to take the money the ronin gave us and get a business,” Goro said accusingly.

“
Baka!
Fool! It was your desire to spend the money on a spree. Now we have a business!” Hanzo replied.

“A failing business! Why didn’t you check this? How can you buy a business without knowing about it? No wonder the former owner sold it to us! He saw a fool coming.”

“You agreed to it, too. That makes you just as big a fool!”

“So you admit that you’re a fool!”

“I admit nothing. It’s just that—”

The knocking at the door of the theater sounded like blows on a taiko drum, reverberating in the empty theater and causing the two peasants’ eyes to grow round with surprise.

“Who’s that?” Goro asked in a whisper.

“I don’t know. Go see.”

“I don’t want to see. Why don’t you see?”

“Why should I see? Why don’t you—”

The knocks were repeated, even more insistently.

The two men looked at each other.

“Why don’t we both see?” Hanzo suggested.

Goro nodded and followed his partner to the theater door. Goro removed the stick that acted as a lock and slid the door open a few inches. He gasped and jumped away from the opening.

“What is it?” Hanzo asked.

Pointing a shaking finger, Goro said, “Look!”

Tentatively, Hanzo peeked through the open slit of the door. There, in the pale light that spilled out through the slit, Hanzo saw an apparition. It was in the shape of a man, with its kimono dripping wet and hanging loosely on its body. A sword was stuck in its sash, and its face was obscured by wet hair. Two eyes glowed out, watching Hanzo like a hawk watches a mouse.

“What’s the matter?” the apparition said.

Hanzo started, but then recognized the voice. “It’s the samurai, Matsuyama-san!” he exclaimed. Goro put his head next to his partner’s, confirming the identification despite the figure’s appearance.

“You look like a ghost!” Hanzo answered.

The figure smiled.

“Don’t smile!” Hanzo said hastily. “It looks even worse when you smile.”

“Well, then, open the door and let me in, or I will be a ghost. If the authorities don’t see me, then the cold will kill me.”

Hanzo slid the door open and allowed Kaze into the theater. Then he slid the door shut and locked it.

“What happened?” Goro asked the samurai.

“I went for a moonlight swim,” Kaze said. He had swum underwater to the darkness under the bridge. That allowed him to surface and take a breath. “I did most of my swimming underwater tonight.” Seeing Goro’s puzzled face, Kaze added, “I had to stay underwater or I’d have been killed.”

“Killed! By who?”

“By you, if you don’t allow me to get out of these wet clothes.”

K
aze was amused. Behind the curtain that hung across the theater’s stage was another world. In a corner, bamboo baskets held wigs and small props. In the center of the backstage area, tatami mats were laid, with small chests that held makeup of various sorts. Along the walls were bamboo poles hung with costumes of all varieties. Kaze had selected a samurai’s costume, but much gaudier than any he would have actually worn.

Hanzo took a small kettle from a firebox and poured Kaze a cup of tea.

Kaze took the cracked cup gratefully, sipping at the bitter liquid with relish.
“Oishii!
Good!” he said.

“So why did you have to go swimming, Samurai-san?” Goro said.

“If I tell you, it may be dangerous,” Kaze replied.

“The first time we met you, you said it might be dangerous. Didn’t we do good with that danger?”

“You did very good.”

“So tell us.”

Kaze considered for a moment. He didn’t know if he could trust these two, but he needed a base of operations in Edo. He decided that he should tell the two men about the reward, not as a test, but because undoubtedly notice boards would spring up all over the city by morning. Now there was no advantage in keeping the reward a secret. “If I tell you, I must also ask you to resist the temptation of a thousand ryo.”

“A thousand!” Goro spluttered.

“Now, now, let’s not get excited about money we don’t have,” Hanzo said to his partner. “This samurai was kind to us and
treated us with honesty and respect. No other samurai has done that for us. I think we should help him.”

“Yes, but a thousand ryo …” Goro muttered.

Scratching his chin, Kaze said, “Actually, I think if you can kill me, you can earn ten thousand ryo.”

“Ten thousand ryo!” Now it was Hanzo’s turn to splutter.

“This man is a devil,” Goro said to Hanzo. “For ten thousand ryo a man would kill his own beloved
obaasan!
If a man would kill his own grandmother, how can he expect us not to do something with him?”

Kaze smiled. “You might find me a little harder to kill than your beloved grandmother,” he suggested.

“Now calm down,” Hanzo said. “The samurai is obviously teasing us. No one could offer ten thousand ryo as a reward. That’s impossible!”

“But with our business failing, even a few ryo would help.”

“Is your theater in trouble?” Kaze asked.

Goro put his hands to his head. Hanzo looked at Kaze and said, “We were cheated when we bought this theater. We were told it was a big moneymaker, and it was, but only because the Kabuki allowed women to do lascivious dances onstage. The Tokugawas recently banned that, so now we have to depend on actors to bring in the crowds.” He sighed. “Now the actors do plays that are like Noh dramas, but they’re not really trained in Noh, and the audience doesn’t seem too interested in it anyway. I was told the audience was mostly men, but without the women dancing, we seem to get only a few family groups. We don’t know what to do. We thought we’d just buy the theater and collect the money, but now we’ll lose everything.”

Kaze shook his head.

Hanzo sighed. “Well, we can settle this in the morning. Don’t worry, Goro and I won’t do anything to turn you in. We have a
room at a boardinghouse near here. We’d invite you there, but it’s a small room and—”

“Don’t worry,” Kaze said. “I’ll be quite comfortable here. We’ll talk in the morning again.”

“All right,” Hanzo said. “Come on, Goro, let’s let the samurai sleep, and we need rest ourselves. We have to figure out what we’re going to do to save this failing theater, and with it our money.”

Hanzo and Goro left, leaving Kaze alone in the dark theater with a single lantern to pierce the murky gloom. Kaze found a robe in one of the costume baskets, and he used it to cover himself as he stretched out on the floor. He blew out the candle and lay in the dark, thinking about his next moves and what he would have to do.

As long as the Tokugawas thought he was the assassin, he would never be able to rescue the girl. If he stood on the street observing the Little Flower brothel, eventually someone would become suspicious and report him to the authorities. He didn’t have money or proper clothes, so he couldn’t walk into the brothel, pretending to be a customer, to look for the daughter of his Lady. In its way, the Little Flower Whorehouse was as tough a fortress to crack as mighty Osaka Castle itself.

As Kaze lay in the darkness, he became aware of a tiny patch of starlight high on the wall. It came from a vent on the back wall of the theater that allowed smoke from lanterns and hibachis to escape. A bamboo lattice covered the vent, keeping out birds and bats, but between the bars, Kaze’s sharp eyes were able to make out individual stars in the sky. Without a pattern to guide him, Kaze wasn’t sure what stars he was looking at, but it comforted him to know that, through those tiny holes in the bamboo lattice, the stars that had accompanied him on all his journeys were once more looking down at him.

From the lattice grill, Kaze also heard the faint, plaintive sounds
of a bamboo flute, the shakuhachi. The high-pitched, breathy notes of the flute floated above the crude roofs of Edo and wove themselves through the starlight. Kaze didn’t know the tune being played, but he did know it was a song of loss and sadness. He closed his eyes and allowed himself the luxury of dropping his guard for just one moment, immersing his being in the slow rhythm of the music.

Kaze thought of the story in
Uji shui monogatari
, which told of Fujiwara Yasumasa, who was walking across a desolate marsh one moonlit night. To while away the time, he started playing his flute. Unknown to him, a dangerous bandit was hiding in the underbrush, waiting to kill and rob him. Through the mastery of his flute playing, Yasumasa mesmerized and overwhelmed the robber, charming him into submission as he fell under the flute’s spell.

Kaze snapped himself to attention. He did so not because he had heard a sound but because he realized he was in a state of reverie where he would miss a small sound, if there was one to hear. Not hearing such a sound could cost him his life. He was not afraid to die, but he wanted his death to have meaning, and being killed because you dropped your guard while listening to flute music was not a meaningful death. Kaze drew his sword closer to him and thought of the death of Takeda Shingen.

While besieging Noda Castle, owned by Ieyasu’s clan, Shingen heard that a flute player played each night from the castle walls. While he played, both sides stopped fighting and listened to the plaintive melodies. Shingen decided to hear this music and had a place set up for him near the castle walls, behind a reed screen. A musketeer saw the preparations and made preparations of his own.

The musketeer set up his gun so he could shoot at the reed enclosure, even in the dark of night. He waited until the flute player was in the midst of his concert and fired one bullet into
the enclosure. By luck, he struck Shingen himself, although at the time the musketeer didn’t know it. Mortally wounded, the wily Shingen gave orders to keep news of his death hidden for three years.

Now Kaze was accused of trying to kill Ieyasu in a similar manner, with a musket. Kaze was almost insulted that they thought he used a musket. Any peasant could be trained to point a musket in the direction of the enemy and fire.

The muskets were the “gift” of the hairy barbarians from Europe, and Kaze wished they were banned from warfare in Japan. A peasant armed with a musket could kill a superbly trained samurai, turning the value of years of samurai training and swordwork upside down. Kaze’s own training had been intense, especially during the formative years when he studied under the Sensei, his teacher.

Almost all Japanese art was taught by a master to a pupil, from painting to dancing to fencing. Over and over again, Kaze was drilled in the physical actions that somehow turned into mental and spiritual lessons. Over and over again.

T
he pattern of attack and defense was repeated endlessly. The purpose was to teach Kaze proper
kata
, or form, and Kaze’s Sensei seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of patience as he persistently practiced the same moves. First Kaze attacked the Sensei using the same precise sequence of moves; then Kaze was in turn attacked by the Sensei, repeating the exact moves Kaze made. As Kaze increased his mastery of the sequence of attack and defense, the Sensei drastically increased the speed, dancing their repetitive ballet at ever higher levels.

Once, when he was ten, Kaze was frustrated by the endless practice, and he dared to swing his sword with anger. Another
would not have detected the emotions behind Kaze’s sword cuts, but the Sensei immediately stopped the practice. He glared at Kaze and said, “Baka! Fool!”

The Sensei never swore, but he made the word “fool” sound as scornful and withering as any torrent from a drunken samurai. Kaze’s face burned red, and he hung his head in shame. It was the Japanese way for the novice to learn from the master, but it was also the Japanese way for the novice to accept the pace of teaching set by the master, and never show frustration.

“I’ll teach you the most important thing you can learn in a fight,” the Sensei said. “Until you defeat yourself, you cannot defeat others. If you fight from anger, frustration, or pride, you cannot win. You must fight from nothingness, letting the sword seek its own path. If you let your emotions rule you in a fight, even if you overcome your enemy, you have not won. Can you understand that?”

“I think so, Sensei.”

“As you get older, you’ll have more cause for rage. It’s a sad part of life that the passage of time is the accumulation of pain. When that happens, you’ll not only understand this lesson better, you’ll have more need of it.”

Kaze had taken that lesson to heart, and had never again vented his emotions through his sword.

This particular practice was an especially long and tedious one. Finally, convinced that Kaze had learned as much as he was going to that day, the Sensei stopped. Gratefully, Kaze sat on a log at the edge of the meadow they were practicing in and he reached for a jug of water.
“Mizu
, Sensei?” Kaze asked.

The old man, who seemed hardly winded, gave a negative nod of his head. Kaze uncorked the jug and poured the water down his throat. The water was cold and sweet, as refreshing as water taken directly from a mountain stream. The Sensei was six times older than Kaze, but Kaze had stopped being embarrassed that
the old man seemed to have resources of stamina that far exceeded his own. The wellspring of the Sensei’s strength was his spirit, not his body, and Kaze knew he had a considerable amount of growth before his spirit could even approach his teacher’s.

“Can you tell me something, Sensei?” Kaze asked after he had caught his breath.

The Sensei nodded his head slightly. Kaze knew this was his signal to continue.

“I practice each pattern until I learn it precisely. If I meet someone in a duel who recognizes what pattern I’m using, won’t it give them an advantage to know my next move?”

“Yes.”

After a silence, Kaze dared ask for more elucidation. “Then why do I practice the patterns so precisely?”