“What else have you got?”
“Aren’t you going to try to take my life, too? The one standing behind me is shaking so much that I can hear his bones rattle. Surely he must be thinking about something like killing me to make him shake so.” Kaze heard a gasp behind him. Then he heard the person behind him step back. Good.
“If we have to, we’re not afraid of killing you!” Yellow Teeth said.
“That’s right, we’ve killed before.”
“Oh? How many times?”
The one with yellow teeth puffed out his chest. “I’ve killed three men! All were smart mouths like you, who didn’t give me their money!”
“And I’ve killed four!” his companion said.
“Seven men. That’s certainly a life’s work to be proud of. Your mothers did a service when they brought you into this world. And how many has the one behind me killed?”
“I’ve killed lots,” said a young voice from behind Kaze. It had a quaver to it.
“You sound too young to have killed many men,” Kaze said without looking behind him.
The two men in front of him laughed. “Pretty good, samurai,” Yellow Teeth said. “Even this stranger can tell you’re a virgin at killing men, boy. An experienced killer would have run this smart mouth samurai through long ago. Like this!”
Yellow Teeth lunged forward with his spear. Kaze stepped to the left and grabbed the shaft of the spear with his left hand as it passed to his right. Spinning in a complete circle, Kaze drew his sword with his right hand and had it swinging in a deadly arc when he completed his spin. The blade caught the man with the sword, who was rushing forward to help his companion. The sword bit deep into his neck and thorax, sliding out as the man’s momentum carried him forward.
Kaze let go of the spear and brought his sword upward into the side of the spearman. The razor-sharp blade cut into the man’s side, slicing deeply just under the rib cage. The man staggered backward, holding onto his side with a surprised look on his face. He lost his footing and fell backward onto the road.
Kaze quickly turned. He was facing a youth holding a spear in trembling hands. Behind him, Kaze could hear the hiss of air burbling from the sliced neck of one man and the groans of pain from the other. Both were dead, or soon would be, and Kaze just had to be careful that the man cut in the side didn’t have the strength to make a last effort to kill him.
Kaze’s eyes met the young man’s. “Well?”
The youth dropped his spear and started running down the road, propelled both by the downhill slope and a jolt of terror. Kaze shook his head and turned to view the two bodies. The entire incident had taken seconds.
Kaze walked over to the man cut in the side. He was desperately trying to hold the pieces of his belly together while his lifeblood gushed out. Kaze put his sword at the ready, prepared to give the coup de grâce. “Should I?” he asked.
The man looked terrified and violently shook his head no. Kaze lowered his sword, wiped it clean on the man’s clothes, and put it back into its scabbard. Then he dragged the man to the side of the road, where he could lean back against a tree out of the sun.
He went to the man with his neck cut but saw that he was already dead. By the time he returned to the man with the cut side, he was dead, too. Kaze looked down at the dead bandit and reflected on the human tendency to sustain a few more miserable seconds of existence in this troubled world. Sometimes it didn’t make sense to him, especially since men would be reincarnated and live again. He sighed. He desired to be free to live or die as he wished, instead of tied up by debts of honor and obligation.
Before she died, the Lady had said, “Find my daughter.” It saddened Kaze to think of that night and all that led up to it. Instead of the serene beauty he associated with her, the Lady’s body was twisted and ravaged by the torture she had endured. Her face was haggard and lined with pain, and Kaze was desperate to find some warm, dry shelter for her. Instead, she was lying in the rain under a crude bower Kaze had constructed from tree limbs. After rescuing her from the Tokugawas, he had eluded the men with the banners with the family crest that looked like a spider: eight bent, white bamboo leaves surrounding a white diamond, all on a black background.
Walking in the dark storm, he had carried her deep into the mountains and, although he was weary, he wanted to continue fleeing the pursuing guards. But he realized she needed rest and had taken the risk of stopping to build a shelter to protect her from the hard rain. Kaze dared not build a fire and was considering asking permission to lie next to the Lady so his body heat could warm her when she had started speaking.
“I don’t know how, but if she’s still alive I want you to find her. It’s my last wish and my last command to you,” she said. She looked at him with feverish eyes, black from strain and pain. The translucent whiteness of her skin was caused by cold and her weakened condition, not by carefully applied rice powder, as it would have been in happier days. It gave her a ghostly appearance.
Kaze couldn’t speak. He bowed formally in response to the Lady’s order. Hot, wet tears flowed down his cheeks and mingled with the icy raindrops striking his face. The Lady extended a weak hand. It trembled with the effort to keep it in the air. “Give me your wakizashi.” Surprised, Kaze removed his short sword from his sash, putting it in her hand. The weight of the sword caused her hand to drop to the ground, but she clutched the scabbard fiercely. At first Kaze thought the Lady had lost heart and was going to use the short sword to commit suicide, but then she said, “This represents your honor and the ability to take your own life. It is now mine until the girl is found.”
Now the sword reposed in the Lady’s funeral temple, waiting for him to reclaim it. That was how many villages and towns ago? And how many faces of little girls had he looked at, hoping to see a glimmer of the Lord or the Lady in that face? She was seven when he started, and now he was asking about nine-year-olds. Would he be asking about ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds before he could find her? But ahead was another village, and maybe in this village he would find what he was seeking. Then his life would be his own again, along with his honor.
He looked around for the bandit’s sword and went to pick it up. Using this weapon instead of his own sword, he started scraping out two shallow graves. When he finished burying the men, he looked at the trees lining the road until he found one that suited his purpose. Using the bandit’s sword, he cleanly sliced a limb off, then took a second cut at the limb’s stump to cut a piece of straight tree branch as long as his hand. He took out the small knife embedded in his scabbard and set to work, his hands moving with practiced economy as he carved the wood. From the rough wood emerged Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. With a few final slices of his knife, he finished the folds of her robe and then gazed into her serene face. It was the face of the Lady, not as he had seen her last, but the way he wanted to remember her.
Placing her by the side of the road where she could look upon the graves of the two bandits, Kaze continued his journey.
CHAPTER 6
Dark night, ghostly moon.
A leaf flutters to the ground.
Demons on the road.
It was early afternoon by the time Kaze walked into the next village. The thatched roofs, the dusty streets that turned to mud when it rained, and the weathered wooden walls all looked familiar to him. Every village in Japan was starting to look the same to him. But like Suzaka, Jiro’s village, Kaze could see that this one, Higashi, was more run-down and tattered than he was used to.
Unlike Jiro’s village, Higashi boasted a tea shop where travelers could get a meal and spend the night. It was located where three roads met, and on the indigo-blue half-curtain that hung from the top of the doorway, the name HIGASHI TEAHOUSE was painted. It wasn’t poetic or imaginative, but Kaze decided that as a name it had the virtues of simplicity and clarity. He stepped into the shop.