“I understand you caused an annoying commotion in the village last night,” Manase said, without turning to look at Kaze.
Kaze gave a deep bow, even though Manase was not looking. “I apologize for disturbing the tranquillity of your District,” Kaze said, “but I wanted to see the weapons the peasants had. Sounding the alarm was one way to see those weapons without engaging in a tedious search. A warrior always grabs the weapon he’s most comfortable with when he’s put in sudden danger.”
Manase gave his high-pitched laugh. “How clever! You are a highly entertaining man. What did you find?” Manase asked when he stopped laughing.
“The only person in the village who grabbed a bow was the Magistrate.”
Manase turned around and gave Kaze a look of surprise that was magnified by the false eyebrows painted high on his forehead. “You think the Magistrate killed that traveling merchant?”
“I don’t know. The arrows used by the Magistrate were not the same as the arrow in the man at the crossroads. That arrow had a dark shaft and unusually fine fletching of gray goose feathers. The Magistrate’s arrows were crude things by comparison. Perhaps bandits did kill that man, and they were disturbed before they could rob him. I just don’t know why they would bother to dump the body at the crossroads.”
“So now you think bandits killed that merchant?”
“He wasn’t a merchant.”
“What?”
“The murdered man was a samurai.” The death of a samurai was much more serious than the death of any merchant. Merchants were actually in one of the lowest social classes. Only the eta, outcasts who handled unclean things like slaughtering animals and tanning hides, were lower on the social strata than merchants.
“How do you know he was a samurai?” Manase demanded.
“His sash was tied to hold two swords. I pointed out the sash to the Magistrate, but he either couldn’t see that or refused to see it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. The sash was loose where the two swords fit.”
“But I was told the dead man looked like a merchant.”
“I don’t shave my head, so without my sword I would also look like a traveler or merchant of some kind and not a samurai,” Kaze pointed out. Samurai typically shaved the front part of their heads, letting the rest of their hair grow long. The long hair was gathered and greased into a topknot, held in place by a dark cord. Kaze’s hair was left to grow and gathered in the back, but he did not shave the front part because of the inconvenience and the expense.
Manase seemed to muse to himself, “How interesting. A samurai was killed. And you think it may be my own Magistrate who is the murderer.”
“I’m not sure who the murderer is, Lord Manase. It could also be the bandits.”
“But surely bandits wouldn’t attack a samurai.”
“They attacked me.”
“What? When?”
“The other day. I walked to Higashi village, and three bandits attacked me on the road.”
“What happened?”
“Two bandits stopped me on the road, and a third tried to sneak up behind me to kill me. The murdered man was shot in the back, so maybe bandits tried the same ruse with him, only they were successful.”
“How did you escape the bandits?”
“I didn’t escape. I killed two. The third was young, so I let him escape me.”
“You killed two of them?”
“Yes. I buried them by the side of the road, because I was told that was the custom in this District.”
Manase pulled a fan from the sleeve of his kimono and started waving it briskly. “Oh, this is all too much for me,” he confessed. “Since it was a samurai killed, we of course must make a better investigation of the circumstances of his death. How can you tell if it was the Magistrate or the bandits who killed him?”
“I’ll try to find out more about the bandits, to see if they use bows in their attacks.”
Manase snapped the fan shut. “Please continue your investigations, Matsuyama-san. I’m not a cruel or unreasonable man. If you can bring evidence to me that someone else murdered that man at the crossroads, I won’t crucify the charcoal seller. In the meantime, I’ll keep the peasant safe here, enjoying my hospitality.”
“You can help by assigning some men to assist me in finding the bandit camp,” Kaze said. “That would make the search go faster.”
“All right,” Manase said. “I’ll order the Magistrate to put together a search party to help you.”
The next morning Kaze was shaking his head in disbelief. “These are the troops?” He looked at the ragtag band of militia before him. He expected professional warriors and instead he got armed peasants.
“Here, here, I thought we were just going to find the bandit camp, not fight them,” Nagato said. “These men will be fine for just finding it.” The Magistrate had come to the gathering point on a horse, but the thick forest ahead meant he would have to walk from here. Across his back was a quiver, and in his hand was the bow that Kaze had seen when he had rousted out the village.
Kaze was still skeptical, but the point of the search was to locate the camp, not destroy it, so he had to admit grudgingly that Nagato might be right. “Fine,” he conceded, “What direction do we search first?”
“North,” Nagato said quickly.
“Is that the direction we’re most likely to find the camp?”
“Yes.”
Kaze, not knowing the local geography, decided to go along with the Magistrate. If he was wrong, there would be time to search in other directions later. “All right,” Kaze answered.
“Good, good,” the Magistrate said. “You men form a line, but stay within shouting distance. We’ll start north and continue until midday. The bandit camp can’t be farther than a half day away. If we haven’t found it by then, we’ll return here.”
And search another direction tomorrow, Kaze silently added.
“Where are you going to be?” Kaze asked the Magistrate.
“I will be on the right wing. You take the left wing.” Normally the leaders would be in the center of a formation of men, but if the Magistrate wanted to try “the double-headed blossom” formation, where two leaders were on the wings, it didn’t bother Kaze.
“Yosh! Let’s do it!” Kaze said, walking to the left so he could take up his position.
The men strung out in a long line, with Kaze at one end and Nagato at the other. There was a large gap between each pair of men so the search party could cover as much ground as possible. With the distance between them and the obscuring brush and trees, each man could see only one or at most two others on each side of him.
Kaze started forward, glimpsing the searcher to his right occasionally when the trees thinned out or when he was on a small hill. The day was sunny and the last residual heat of a humid summer clung to the trunks of trees, making the air thick and still. The heavy underbrush made progress difficult, and occasionally Kaze had to make a detour to keep moving forward. He soon lost sight of the searcher to the right. He was farther than hailing distance, but he had no intention of shouting if he found any sign of the bandits anyway. With this group of peasant militia, he didn’t want to alert the bandits or get into a fight with them.
He kept his eyes open for the signs of a path or some other indication that humans were in the area. Thus far he had seen nothing of interest, except that a bamboo forest was growing to his left, encroaching on the territory of the pines and cryptomeria. Even in nature, there are wars for territory, Kaze thought.
Because of the heat, he paused for a moment, sitting on the large gnarled root of a tree to rest. He pulled a small earthenware bottle from his sash and took out the peg that sealed the top. He tilted his head back to pour cool water into his mouth when he heard the familiar whistling sound of an arrow in flight. Kaze had been in battles where the sky was black with deadly shafts, and he knew that sound.
Not pausing, Kaze simply tumbled backward off the root of the tree, falling behind it as the arrow struck the trunk with a solid thunk. Kaze had no time to see how close the arrow would have come, because from the woods there came a lusty shout from the throats of many men. From the undergrowth a dozen men emerged, all dressed in stolen cast-offs like the bandits he had met on the road. They brandished spears and swords, and their headlong charge would converge on Kaze’s position in just a few moments. Kaze rolled to his feet and started running. He had been ambushed.