In Darkness, Death Page 3

  Father meant that the life of a samurai was much harder than that of a tea merchant. He was right—that was why merchants were so looked down upon. Father did not see the point of practicing the many things a samurai must be skilled at—besides archery, swords-manship, and hand-to-hand combat, a samurai should know how to write poetry, arrange flowers in an artistic fashion, and even conduct a formal tea ceremony. Except for the tea ceremony, Father couldn’t see how any of those skills helped you make money.

  Seikei found all those things difficult, it was true. (Except for writing poetry, which he had always done whenever Father did not notice.) Sometimes, he thought he would never master them. He had not even earned the right to carry the two steel swords—one long, one short—that only a samurai could wear. For now, he had to be content with the wooden one. But as the judge had told him, “If your heart is that of a samurai, a wooden sword is as mighty as a steel one.”

  The door to the room opened, and Yutaro stood there. “Have you seen everything you need to see?” he asked.

  The judge opened his eyes slowly, as if Yutaro had awakened him from a nap. “I have seen the assassin,” he said.

  Yutaro looked stunned. He glanced around the room. “Where is he? Has he come back?”

  “I should have said, I have seen what the assassin is like,” replied the judge. “It’s nearly the same thing.”

  Yutaro’s face clouded. “I expect more than that,” he said. “The shogun told me he was sending the best investigator he had. If that is true, it is surprising anyone in Edo considers themselves safe.”

  The judge bowed his head. “We will try to do a little better,” he said. Turning to Seikei, he added, “Now is the time for us to leave.”

  Yutaro escorted them to the castle entrance. Seikei’s ears were burning. He could not understand why the judge allowed himself to be insulted in such a manner. Seikei could hardly restrain himself from drawing his wooden sword. It would be strong enough to break open Yutaro’s skull.

  Outside, the judge said to Seikei, “You are learning to control yourself, I see. But I could still feel your anger, and I suspect Yutaro could too.”

  “Weren’t you angry?” Seikei asked.

  “Should I have been?”

  “Yutaro insulted you.”

  “That was his intention, clearly. In my youth, I would have been tempted to draw my sword and see which of us was more skillful. After that, almost certainly one of us would have died.”

  “I am sure you would not have been the loser.”

  “Possibly. It is unwise to assume that just because someone has no manners, he is an inferior swordsman as well. In any case, if I defeated him, then I would have to report to the shogun that I carried out his order to find the assassin of Lord Inaba by killing his son, the new Lord Inaba.” The judge glanced at Seikei. “What do you think the shogun would ask me to do then?”

  Seikei didn’t want to answer, but he had to. “He would expect you to commit seppuku, to kill yourself.”

  “And I would be grateful, because he would be saving me from the disgrace of doing anything that foolish again. ”

  “But still,” Seikei protested. “Your honor as a samurai—”

  “If you think your honor demands that you kill every dog who barks at you,” said the judge, cutting him off, “you will only find yourself spending all your time chasing dogs. There is no honor in that.”

  The judge led Seikei around to the side of Lord Inaba’s castle. He pointed to the window high above, from which the assassin had lowered himself. “It took a courageous man to climb down from that height,” said the judge. “It would be an honorable achievement to capture him.”

  Seikei looked around the snow-covered ground. Only a few animal tracks were visible. The judge pointed to them. “Those are the marks a fox would make,” he said.

  “Yes,” Seikei agreed. “The snow must have continued to fall and covered up the murderer’s footprints.”

  “Perhaps,” said the judge. “Let us go see the guards who let him into Lord Inaba’s room.”

  They mounted their horses and rode toward the shogun’s palace. The ride was slow because the city’s streets, as always, were crowded. Samurai whose wrap-around kosodes were marked with the crests of the daimyos they served swaggered through the street, each one ready to assert the greatness of his lord above all others. There would have been continual bloody fights in the capital’s roadways had it not been that the shogun banned all combat inside the city. The penalty for violating the order was death.

  Several times, passing samurai glanced furtively at the judge. The chrysanthemum crest on his kosode, of course, marked him as one of the shogun’s officials, but his size was an indication to many that he was the famous Judge Ooka. A few samurai even greeted him with a bow of respect, and shopkeepers who were in the doorways trying to attract customers bowed very low as he passed. Although none of these people paid any attention to Seikei, he took pride in the respect shown to his foster father.

  Suddenly Judge Ooka reined in his horse. “Hai!” he shouted. “Tatsuno!” Seikei looked in the direction the judge was facing. The only person he saw was a thin, shabby-looking man in a plain brown kimono. As soon as the man heard the judge shout, he turned and slipped down an alley between two shops.

  “Go after him,” the judge told Seikei. “I want to talk to him.”

  4

  CAPTURING A NINJA

  Seikei urged his horse toward the alley where the thin man had disappeared. He soon saw, however, that it was too narrow for the horse to go inside, so he dismounted and ran on foot.

  It was dark inside the alley. The shopkeepers on either side had built a roof over it to protect the goods stored there. Dimly, Seikei could see wicker baskets and wooden crates stacked along the walls—but no thin man.

  He must be hiding behind one of the crates, Seikei realized. With one hand on the hilt of his wooden sword, he made his way carefully from one crate to another. The thin man had not been wearing a sword, but he might be carrying some other kind of weapon.

  Without warning, Seikei caught sight of a swift movement farther up the alley. He looked just in time to see the back of a brown kimono. “Stop!” he shouted, and ran after it.

  The thin man disappeared again, just as swiftly as before. But Seikei kept running, sure that his quarry was somewhere up ahead.

  Suddenly he felt a stabbing pain in the bottom of one of his feet. As he put the other foot down, the same pain shot upward through his other foot. Involuntarily, he hopped about, trying to get away from whatever was causing the pain.

  Finally he fell down—fortunately falling backwards, for when he felt around on the ground in front of him, he discovered a cluster of sharp, spiked metal objects. He picked one up and examined it. An ugly little thing, it consisted of five spikes sticking out from a small center. Whichever way it landed on the ground, two spikes would always point upward, ready to pierce the feet of anyone who stepped on it. They must have been strewn here by the man Seikei had been pursuing.

  Gingerly Seikei took off his sandals and removed the spiky things that were caught in them. Fortunately he wasn’t badly hurt—the thick straw sandals had been enough protection.

  Still, as he limped back down the alley, Seikei felt ashamed that he had failed to carry out the task that the judge had given him.

  To his surprise, however, the judge was not there waiting for him. Along with his own horse and Seikei’s, he had disappeared. Seikei looked up and down the street, wondering what to do. The judge had left him on his own before, but usually he provided some kind of instructions before doing so.

  “Follow the path.” For some reason, those words popped into Seikei’s head. Often, the judge used them to describe his method of capturing a criminal. Well, the path had led through the alley, but Seikei wasn’t able to get through. What if he went around?

  Seikei turned at the next corner and went up to the street on the other side. As he reached it, he looked do
wn to the place where the alley came out. He saw something truly astonishing: Judge Ooka was there, sitting on the outstretched form of the man who had fled down the alley.

  The judge spotted Seikei at the same time and gestured for him to hurry. Seikei ran. “Where have you been?” the judge asked when he approached. “I expected you to come out of the alley.”

  “There were sharp things in there that hurt my feet,” Seikei explained.

  “Tatsuno!” said the judge, giving a sharp slap across the shoulders to the man he was sitting on. “Did you scatter tennen-bishi in there?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tatsuno in a voice that was slightly muffled because he was facedown on the ground. “Anyway, they were small ones.”

  “Why did you try to run away?”

  “I didn’t see who you were. I thought someone might be trying to rob me.”

  “Rob you?” The judge laughed, rocking back and forth and making Tatsuno all the more uncomfortable. “It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?”

  “That was a misunderstanding,” Tatsuno said. “And anyway, I didn’t harm anyone.”

  “You wouldn’t have been inside Lord Inaba’s castle the night before last, would you?” the judge asked.

  “Oh, no, Your Honor,” said Tatsuno. “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “With what?”

  “Why, everyone has heard that Lord Inaba was killed,” said Tatsuno. “It’s the talk of Edo.”

  “Killed by a ninja?”

  “That’s how it is,” Tatsuno said with a touch of self-pity. “If something bad happens, everybody wants to blame a ninja.”

  “Tatsuno is a ninja,”Judge Ooka informed Seikei.

  “He is?” Seikei took a second look at the thin man, now dusty and a little scraped here and there. He certainly wasn’t what Seikei had imagined when his mother had frightened him with tales of fierce ninjas.

  “I’ve retired,” said Tatsuno with dignity. “I’m a teacher now.”

  “Fetch a rope,” the judge told Seikei. “We must tie him so he won’t try to escape.”

  Tatsuno protested loudly. “There is no need for that,” he said in a silky voice. “None at all. How could anyone ever escape from your lordship anyway?”

  “They couldn’t, but I don’t want to waste my time chasing you,” said the judge.

  “You won’t have to do that, Your Honor.”

  “I have a task for you,” the judge said.

  Tatsuno hesitated. “What sort of task?”

  “Get the rope,” the judge told Seikei again, pointing to his horse, which had a coil of rope in back of the saddle.

  “All right!” Tatsuno shouted. “I’ll do it, whatever it is.”

  “And you won’t try to escape again?” asked the judge.

  “No.”

  “I have your word of honor as a ninja?”

  “Yes, yes, my word of honor.”

  The judge stood up, and slowly, quite slowly, Tatsuno picked himself up from the ground. As he dusted himself off, Seikei saw that he wore a perpetually wary look, as if he were afraid something terrible were about to happen. Or perhaps that was just the effect the judge had on him.

  “What’s the task?” Tatsuno asked.

  “First we’re going to the prison,” said the judge.

  “I thought we had an agreement,” said Tatsuno, dismayed.

  “We do. We’re not going to leave you there—unless I receive some information I don’t expect. We’re just going to visit some prisoners.”

  The judge mounted his horse. Seikei could never understand how he did that so easily, as heavy as he was. After Seikei got on his own horse, Tatsuno said, “You know, that horse looks strong enough to carry both of us.”

  “You walk along next to me,” the judge told him. “I want to know what else you’ve heard about Lord Inaba’s murder.”

  The way Tatsuno told it, he had heard nothing about Lord Inaba’s murder. He’d even forgotten who told him about it in the first place. “Probably someone in a sake shop,” he said. “You know people will say anything there, true or not.”

  Finally, the judge said to him, “The evidence at the scene of the crime indicates that a ninja was the assassin.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Tatsuno responded. “Whenever anything bad happens—”

  “No one saw the killer,” the judge interrupted, “not even the guards. And he escaped by lowering a rope from a high window.”

  Tatsuno shrugged. “Could be someone trying to throw blame on the ninjas. These days, people pick up a trick or two and think that’s all there is to being a ninja.”

  “Where were you the night before last?” the judge asked.

  “Me, Your Honor?” ‘Tatsuno seemed deeply hurt by the question. “I was sound asleep at my cousin’s house.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In the Hongo district, far from Lord Inaba’s castle.”

  “I’m sure your cousin will confirm what you’ve said.”

  “He’d better. Er ... certainly he will, Your Honor.”

  The prison was a complex of ugly gray stone buildings that sent a thrill of fear through Seikei every time he saw them. They occupied as much land as a small farm and were as difficult to enter as any daimyo’s castle. The three of them had to cross a moat, pass through a guarded gate in the massive outer wall that surrounded the entire prison, and then cross a second moat.

  Even though the guards recognized Judge Ooka as one of the shogun’s high officials, they kept him waiting until the warden emerged from somewhere in the main building. The warden was a member of the Ishide family, who had operated the prison ever since the first Tokugawa had become shogun. Only the Ishides were willing to do the job.

  The judge told Ishide-san that he wanted to see the two men who had guarded Lord Inaba.

  Ishide-san shook his head. “We have had to chain them for their own protection,” he said. “They keep trying to kill themselves. If you sentence them to death, they will carry out the task.”

  “For now, I wish only to speak with them,” said the judge.

  The warden led them to one of the cleaner-looking buildings. Here, Seikei knew, prisoners of samurai status were kept. Each had a cell to himself, and if they had money, they could order food and other luxuries from outside the walls.

  Lord Inaba’s two samurai had no luxuries. Kept in the same cell, each had his legs chained to the wall. A second chain bound their arms behind their backs. As soon as the judge saw them, he said, “Free their arms.”

  The warden started to object, but shrugged and said, “It is by your order.”

  The men hardly moved as he unlocked their chains. The judge stood in front of them and asked, “You were the two men assigned to guard Lord Inaba’s bedchamber?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” they said together. One of them added, “We should have committed seppuku as soon as we learned what happened.” The other nodded and said, “Would your lordship have mercy and allow us that honorable death now?”

  “Answer my questions first,” the judge replied. “You don’t appear to be careless men. Did you fall asleep that night?”

  The two prisoners hung their heads. “We did,” said the first man, “though it seemed more like an enchantment than sleep.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked the judge.

  “Because I dreamed of a fox,” recalled the man. “A fox that spoke to me. It didn’t seem strange, not at all like a dream. That was why, when I awoke later, I thought a fox had gotten into Lord Inaba’s room.”

  As the man spoke, Seikei noticed that his story was having an odd effect on Tatsuno. He nearly jumped at the mention of the talking fox, and now he looked at the judge as if he wanted to say something urgent.

  “I know,” the judge murmured, calming Tatsuno somewhat. “I remember.”

  The judge turned his attention to the prisoner again. “What did the fox say to you?”

  The man thought for a moment and looked puzzled. “You kno
w, I can’t remember,” he said. “It seemed like quite a pleasant conversation, as if we were somehow friends.”

  “I remember,” said the second prisoner. The first one looked at him in surprise, and the second one said, “I was too ashamed to tell before now. I had the same dream. The fox kept telling me what a brave, vigilant samurai I was—truly a faithful retainer of Lord Inaba....” He paused, swallowed hard, and added, “Lies. The fox lied to me.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Judge Ooka. “I understand that there were many guests at Lord Inaba’s castle that night.”

  “Yes. He had just returned to Edo for the year and many of his friends were invited.”

  “And his enemies?”

  “Lord Inaba had no enemies,” the prisoner said firmly. The other one nodded his agreement.

  “Another question then,” said the judge. “Did you have anything to eat or drink at the party?”

  The two men were silent, and Seikei guessed the answer. “Only a little sake,” the first prisoner said finally. “Just one cupful. It was not strong enough—”

  The judge interrupted him. “Who served it to you?”

  “Why ... a wine steward. Come to think of it, he tried to serve me several times before I accepted.”

  “One of the regular household servants?”

  “No, this was someone new. A fat man, very eager to please.”

  “Did he look like this man?” The judge pointed to Tatsuno, whose face grew more wary than before.

  “No, I told you the steward was fat. This man is thin.”

  “This man knows how to change his appearance,” said the judge. “Study his face.”

  The prisoner did so, carefully. “No, I’m sure it wasn’t him. The steward was older than this man, although their faces were somewhat similar.”

  “You agree?” the judge asked the other prisoner, who nodded and added, “This man would never have been admitted to Lord Inaba’s castle. He looks like a beggar.”

  Seikei saw a look of satisfaction on Tatsuno’s face. He was no beggar, for certain, Seikei thought.

  “I have one other thing for you to look at,” the judge told the two samurai. He reached into his kimono and drew forth the paper butterfly.