Lord Oda's Revenge (2 page)

But the blind man had some experience with the missionaries who ran the Portuguese port, and he knew they were not fools. They needed Sumitada for their port, but they knew he was not important to the countrys future – he was little more than a leaf, floating on a pool, and the ripples that moved that leaf were the powerful lords like Tokugawa.

Besides, Sumitada was a coward, not a strategist. He had become a laughing stock among the samurai for his conversion, and was hated by the peasants in his dominion. The blind man had even heard that once, Sumitada-Bartoromeo was walking in the countryside, when he came upon a shrine to a local cockerel spirit, adorned with a statue. He had smashed the statue, screaming blasphemous imprecations against the Shinto gods, talking madly of idols, and if he had been any less than a daimyo he would have been cut down where he stood for his disrespect.

Daimyo or not, the blind man didn't think Sumitada would make it through another year.

There was a change in the sound of the rainfall, and the blind man realized that Jun had stopped. He heard footsteps, coming towards them from behind.

Many footsteps, moving fast.

‘Who is it?' he said, as the footsteps surrounded them.

‘Barbarians,' said Jun. His voice was quavering, nervous. ‘They have tattoos on their arms, and they are carrying daggers.'

‘Sailors?' the blind man asked.

‘I don't know. They are tall and white and have green and blue eyes, like cats.'

Portuguese,
thought the blind man.

The blind man heard one of the men – he was just in front, to the right – say, in heavily accented Japanese, ‘Stop, thieves.'

The blind man held up his empty hands. ‘We have stolen nothing.'

The man – the blind man guessed he was the leader, perhaps even the captain of the ship – took a step forward. ‘Our guard is gone. Our guns are gone. And you are here.'

The blind man backed up against the wall. ‘We can settle this like—'

‘No. We settle this with your deaths.' There was the sound of weapons being raised, and Jun screamed as the men closed in on them.

The blind man was not yet old, and he feared death. But he was here of his own will – the boy was here because he was paid. He gripped Jun's arms and pulled him against the wall, turning his own body to cover him. Then – and in the same heartbeat – he formed his hand into the
karana mudra
for expelling demons, the index and little fingers extended, which was a weapon disguised as a tool for meditation. He struck at the boy's neck with his hardened fingers, finding the pressure point that would put him out for an incense stick, at least. The boy slumped to the ground. Good. Better that he lie there, unharmed.

The blind man felt the souls of all the men he had killed crowding around him, as if they had returned as hungry ghosts from the realm of
annoyo
to weigh him down, to cling to him like pale parasites. He had lived a long time, and in the last month he had promised himself that soon he would retire from the world, enter a monastery, and kill no more men.

But not just yet.

Yes, the blind man feared death. He had made so much of it, sent so many men to Amida Buddha, that if he was lucky he would be reincarnated on four legs, and if he was not, he would spend his next lifetime being boiled in a pot, the souls of his victims feeding insatiably on his being, for the dead are always hungry.

And now he would be forced to make more.

As if he were holding a magnifying glass to a scroll, he brought the world into focus, centring his
qi.
He could hear every raindrop, and he knew where they hit the ground, and
where they were prevented from doing so by the bodies of men. Then there was the smell of them. A blend of sweat, sea salt, and rum – and underneath all that, the iron scent of blood. The blind man had heard that when Lord Oda lost the use of his right arm, he learned to wield his sword in his left, compensating for his loss. Something similar had happened to the blind man, his sense of smell becoming so acute that he could almost see these barbarian sailors, glowing in the dark around him like skeletal assemblages of red tubing, pulsing, pulsing with fresh blood.

He felt the first man move towards him, swinging something in his hand – he could hear the
whum
,
whum
,
whum
it made as it rotated. It could have been a sword, or it could have been a rope.

It didn't matter.

He heard the man sidestep to hit him with the thing that sang in the air, and he felt pity. These men were corpses, and they didn't even know it. The blind man ducked, turned, struck out with his heel. The barbarian dropped to one knee – it made a
crack
sound against the stone – and cried out, but the sound was cut off as the blind man drew his concealed blade and let it leap for the man's throat.

Another one approached him from behind, the rain pattering on his head as loud as temple bells, and the blind man threw his left hand back while his sword impaled another man before him. The fingers of his rear hand struck the same spot he had aimed for on the boy, though this time he did it harder. The man behind fell, as the one in front screamed, trying to pull himself off the blind man's sword. With a twitch of his wrist, the blind man withdrew the blade, thrusting it up and to the side in the same movement, cutting another's throat.

The other men had a better idea of what they were dealing with now, and two of them came at him from either side, throwing out their arms to try to contain him. But they would sooner catch one of the raindrops that gave them away; they would more easily spear the very wind. He moved back, so quickly it made the attackers' movements seem exaggerated, as if they were moving through a different medium – they were creatures of liquid, and he was a creature of the air.

They were still bringing their arms together, still believing he was there, when he gutted them. Now three men attacked him at once, and he was forced to adapt his tactics. He brought his foot up, hard, between the first man's legs, while striking behind him with his sword, and simultaneously driving his left palm up to smash the middle sailor's nose. Fighting fair might be the best way to accumulate good karma, but as far as this realm of samsara went, it was also the best way to get yourself killed. Without pausing, he followed his punch with a dose of steel to the gut, then stepped forward. The man he had kicked in the groin was still doubled over, and it was the work of a child to behead him.

The blind man heard curses, presumably Portuguese. He was no longer thinking now, but was lost in a type of Zen meditation, where the question of what belonged to his body and what was outside of it became meaningless. He was the rain, and the wind, and the stone below his feet.

A very faint voice at the back of his mind told him this fight was unfair, but he knew that there was no fairness in fighting – only the dead, and the living.

He was living. Everyone else was dead.

He avoided a blow from an irrelevant weapon, dimly hearing the
whap
as it sliced the air where he had been standing a
moment before, and then he brought his sword up to eviscerate the barbarian. The man screamed, shocked, as if this were not to be expected. The blind man sighed inwardly. As soon as these men had stepped onto the quay, they had been dead. Better that they accept it – otherwise they would not believe they were in
annoyo,
and their reincarnation would be hard on them.

Amida Buddha,
he called out silently, as he leaped towards the last of them.
I call on you and on all good karma to assist these souls in their journey.
With hands of iron, he snapped the man's wrist, hearing his dagger clang on the stone. Then he gripped the man's head and angled his mouth to bite his neck, feeling the blood flow into him, making him stronger.

He drank deep.

Breathing hard, letting the body of the barbarian fall to the ground, the blind man slowly sheathed his sword – it slid into a scabbard that lay snug against his side, under his robe. He was turning to the boy when there came a metallic scraping sound from towards the sea. He froze. From the other side, by the warehouse wall, came another. Then another, from the left. And the right.

Slowly he turned full circle, listening to the rain. A dozen men, at least, were encircling him, keeping a safe distance. He concentrated. Each of them held something out in front of him – something long and hard.

Guns.

‘It's raining,' he said, conversationally. ‘If your guns don't fire, you will have to engage me hand to hand. And then you will die.' He said this with resignation, not pride.

‘No,' said one of the men, his accent that of the samurai class. These men were Japanese. ‘These guns are new.'

‘They fire—' began another of the men.

‘With a spark,' said the blind man, nodding. Of course. Perhaps it was finally time to face the afterlife, and see what torments awaited him there.

‘Father Valignano said there was a ninja in town,' said another voice, and it was a voice the blind man knew well. Oh, so very well. ‘He didn't say you were blind. Before we kill you, I would like you to tell me what you know about these guns. Where did you hear of them? Do you know of my plans for them?'

The blind man didn't answer, only lowered his hands to his sides. ‘My lord,' he said, kneeling on the cold, wet stone.

There was a grunt of surprise from the darkness that was all he would ever see. ‘You know me?' said Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu.

‘Of course,' said the blind man. ‘I have served you long enough.'

Lord Tokugawa took a step forward – the blind man could hear, from the pattern of the rain's pattering, that he wore his full samurai regalia, the horned helmet included. The blind man wondered, in a distant corner of his mind, why Sumitada had allowed Lord Tokugawa to come here. He must have thrown in his lot with the most powerful daimyo, the blind man supposed, now that Oda was dead.

‘
Shusaku?
' said Lord Tokugawa.

The ninja mountain, somewhere on Northern Honshu Island

The same day

W
ATASHI WA
. . .
HIRAGANA O
. . .
yomu koto ga dekimas
. . . Taro traced his finger along the line of symbols, speaking the sounds out loud. ‘I. . . can read. . . hiragana.'

‘You can,' said Hana, smiling.

Taro grinned. For now, it was only the hiragana that he had mastered – the simplified form of writing that was used mainly by women. But now that he had learned these forms, he would be able to progress to the kanji, and eventually be able to read and write the language of the nobles. Hana had already shown him the character for the word ‘field', and he could see how it showed a field from above, subdivided into sections, and he marvelled at how the Chinese had created tiny, perfect pictures of the things around them, to make them into words.

‘Now,' said Hana, ‘you owe me some sword practice.' The previous autumn, Taro had fought against Hana's father, Lord Oda, a sword saint whose skill with the blade was feared and admired throughout the land. Taro had held his own – and in the end the cruel Lord Oda had died, falling down the stairs of his own castle. Since then, Taro's mastery of the sword had only increased, to the point that even here, at the mountain
stronghold of the ninjas, there was no one who could teach him anything new.

‘Well, if you want to be beaten again. . .' From beside the writing table, Taro pulled out his
katana.
It had been given to him on his return to the mountain, a gift to celebrate his victory over Lord Oda. As a ninja, he would use a short-sword called a
wakizashi
for most missions, but there was nothing to compare to fighting with the full-length sword.

That was if he remained a ninja, of course. Taro was no longer sure what he should do, now that his mentor Shusaku was dead. It had been Shusaku who had always known what to do, Shusaku who had saved Taro's life and then led him and his best friend Hiro through every subsequent trial. Taro knew that he couldn't stay here on this mountain forever, pretending that the world outside no longer existed. But what could he do? He didn't know if he could go to Lord Tokugawa and present himself as the daimyo's long-lost son – Shusaku had said that the lord would be horrified to have a vampire for a child. Of course, Lord Tokugawa's other sons were dead now, so perhaps he would welcome Taro, no matter what had happened to him – but it was an enormous risk to take.

He knew, too, that he couldn't go looking for his mother, though he was desperate to do so. On the night when he and Shusaku left his home village of Shirahama, Shusaku had given her a pigeon, telling her to set it free with a message when she was safe. But the pigeon had still not arrived at the ninja mountain – it had been the first thing Taro asked when he returned here from Lord Oda's castle. So he was trapped at the mountain. He couldn't leave, because if he did he might miss her message when it came. At the same time he was conscious that all the time he waited here, she was somewhere out there, alone. He wanted so much to
see her again and run into her arms – he was a ninja now and he had killed men, but he still needed his mother.