“Meaning?”
“Gomen nasai. I’m sorry. I meant that I am willing to fight when the stakes are right, but I must know what I am fighting to accomplish.”
“You wouldn’t fight just because your Lord told you to?”
“Of course, a samurai’s first duty is to obey his Lord. But I could be more effective in fighting if I understood what the objective is.”
“How do you reconcile that with unquestioned obedience?”
“I am not questioning; I am simply understanding the purpose.”
“A strategist,” Manase said teasingly, placing a stone that started an attack on Kaze’s territory.
“No, a realist,” Kaze said, responding with a stone that threatened to encircle Manase’s attacking stone.
Manase stopped to ponder the board for a few minutes. “I misjudged you,” Manase said. “I mistook your calm nature for a lack of fighting spirit. Now I see you’re quite willing to fight when it suits you.” He placed a stone down to support his attacker.
The battle on the go board continued to ebb and flow, with both players locked in a struggle to assure the survival of their stones. Manase would constantly offer Kaze a perceived opening, but, upon study, Kaze would see that the moves were cunning traps designed to get him to commit to a course of action that would eventually lead to disaster.
After Kaze refused one such gambit, Manase gave his affected laugh and said, “It’s quite frustrating playing you.”
“Why?”
“You never accept my invitations.” Manase clicked down a stone.
“I will when the time is right.” Kaze answered with a stone of his own.
“When will the time be right?” Another stone.
“There is a time for everything.” Kaze paused to study the board. “Patience is the coin that buys the proper time.” He placed his stone.
“In that you are like Tokugawa-sama,” Manase said.
Kaze, who disliked being compared to the new ruler of Japan, said, “Why do you say that?”
“Haven’t you heard the story they’ve recently made up to show the character of the last three rulers of Japan?”
“No.”
“It’s really quite amusing. They say Nobunaga-sama, Hideyoshi-sama, and Tokugawa-sama were looking at a bird on a limb, and they wanted the bird on the ground. I’ll kill it, Nobunaga-sama says, and that will bring it to the ground. I’ll talk to it, Hideyoshi-sama says, and convince it to come to the ground. And I will sit, Tokugawa-sama says, and wait until the bird wants to come to the ground itself.”
Kaze had to laugh. The story was both irreverent toward the leaders of Japan and illustrative of their characters. “But,” Kaze added, “at Sekigahara, Tokugawa-sama stopped waiting. He attacked, and he won.” Kaze placed a stone to start an attack on Manase’s position on the go board.
The play of the stones became increasingly rapid, with the click of pieces played sounding quicker and quicker as the battle between the two men was joined. Go was a common game for a warrior because it taught the need for proper timing of attacks, the value of evaluating the biggest move, and the virtue of anticipating an enemy’s response. It held a fascination that prompted the proverb, “A go player will miss his own father’s funeral.”
Despite Manase’s maneuvers and stratagems, Kaze played a calm and steady game, and by the end Kaze had a fifteen-point advantage and victory. “You’re a stronger go player than I imagined,” Manase said, as he scooped stones into his bowl.
“I was just lucky.”
“There is no luck in go. Like shogi, Japanese chess, the game is all skill. It’s not like dice or war, where luck is everything.”
“There’s no skill in war?”
Manase placed the lid on his bowl. “Only the skill to take advantage of the opportunities that luck has brought you. Now that you have beaten me at go, we’re even.”
Kaze gave him a quizzical look.
“It was my strategy to use a net to capture you,” Manase explained. “I knew the Magistrate and his miserable guards could never capture someone as strong as you were described to be without some kind of clever stratagem. Now that I’ve met you, I see I was right.”
“That strategy was a good one. I’ll remember it.”
“Yes, I’m sure you will. We’ll have to see about some other game to see who the eventual winner will be between us.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, poetry composition or something similar. Please be my guest for a few days. I’ve already instructed the Magistrate to return your sword to you. If you stay, it will give me a chance to study you and see what would be the best thing to challenge you with next.”
“Thank you. I will stay briefly, but I can’t impose on you. I’ll be just as happy to continue staying with the charcoal seller.”
Manase giggled, his humor, which had been soured by the go game, seeming to return. “Oh, that’s quite impossible. You see, I intend to crucify that charcoal seller.”
CHAPTER 10
The caterpillar
spins a cocoon. What knowledge
from a fuzzy head!
“Why do you want to crucify the charcoal seller?” Kaze asked, surprised.
“Oh, for the death of that merchant at the crossroads.”
“But the charcoal seller didn’t do that.”
“You found him standing over the body yourself.”
“But the man was killed with an arrow. The charcoal seller had no bow.”
“He probably hid the bow. You know that weapons have been forbidden to peasants since the time of Hideyoshi-sama’s great sword hunt, which is almost twenty years now. The recent war between the Toyotomis and the Tokugawas has allowed the peasants to gather arms again, so I know they all have their secret cache. They claim they need them for defense against bandits, but peasants are notoriously greedy. They’ll often kill if there’s a few coppers in it for them. You just interrupted the charcoal seller before he could rob the merchant.”
“Perhaps the charcoal seller interrupted a bandit-”
“Oh, don’t go on,” Manase said. “If the charcoal seller didn’t kill that merchant, then I’m sure it was someone else from this village. Killing one peasant is as good as killing another. It serves as a lesson to all of them. Please don’t bother me with this talk about the charcoal seller again. It’s quite boring. Instead, come with me. I want you to meet someone.”
Manase rose, and protocol required Kaze to stand, too. Kaze noticed that Manase wore trousers that were long and trailed behind him. His feet in the trouser legs rubbed against the tatami mats, making an exotic swish-swish sound as Manase walked. It took practice to walk in this kind of pants, and they were normally reserved only for officials of the Imperial Court. Kaze followed behind, his cotton tabi gliding silently. The sound of the long legs of Manase’s trousers rubbing across the tatami reminded Kaze of happier days, in a life long before his current wandering state.
Kaze couldn’t enjoy the sound made by Manase’s passage, however. He had come to like the charcoal seller, and Manase’s plans to crucify Jiro did not sit well. Kaze was not repelled by the thought of death. He had been raised to believe that death is just a part of the natural cycle of life and rebirth all men must go through. With hundreds of crimes carrying the penalty of death, he had also seen countless executions and had even ordered several himself.
What bothered him was the prolonging of death. He knew some men derived pleasure from the suffering of others, and he wondered if the strange District Lord leading him through the passages of the seedy villa was such a man. Kaze believed that death, when necessary, should come cleanly and quickly. There were good ways to die and bad ways to die, and crucifixion was not a good way to die.
Some lords who favored crucifixion also favored the novel Christian cross, an invention that came into Japan with the smelly Christian priests and pale, Western traders who were little more than pirates. But given Manase’s proclivities toward old things, Kaze was sure that a traditional Japanese cross would be used: Two poles set into the ground to form an X, the arms of the victim tied to the top of the X so he was hanging. The pull of the earth would settle the victim’s lungs and other organs, and the man would die an agonizing death of slow asphyxiation. For a small, wiry man like Jiro, that kind of death could take many long days.