The bile rose in Shichio’s throat when he remembered his last visit to this wretched place. He’d left the Okuma compound in disgrace, no thanks to that giant pig Mio. Shichio would have thought the fat man’s precious bushido code would have forbidden throwing a fight to a cripple.
Shichio supposed he owed the fat man a debt of gratitude. If it weren’t for his superhuman endurance—if he hadn’t survived long enough to reveal Shichio’s designs for marriage—the Bear Cub might never have approached the Wind, and then Shichio’s informant could never have betrayed the boy. He knew now that his assassin had failed; the absence of a second communiqué proved the first message was false. But it was enough just to learn that the boy had made contact with the Wind. Shichio had stepped up his wedding plans, while the Bear Cub must surely have gone to ground. That typhoon had forced even Hashiba’s flagship into port. No cripple could withstand it.
Shichio touched his hair, which was behaving peevishly in this all-pervading heat. He stepped out of the launch to walk side by side with Hashiba down the jetty toward the palanquin. Once inside, he carefully brushed all the sand from his fine silk stockings and smooth wooden sandals. There was little sand on the jetty to begin with, but Shichio would abide no imperfections on this perfect day.
As his palanquin rocked side to side with the footsteps of the bearers, Shichio looked out at the emerald tangle of kudzu strangling the black rocks. He wondered how long it would take him after the wedding to sell his new holdings and buy an estate in the Kansai. Only barbarians could make a permanent home in Izu. The humidity alone was reason enough to leave and never come back.
“What have you got in that scarf of yours?” Hashiba said, nodding at the little parcel Shichio unconsciously worked in his hands. It was wrapped in the finest Chinese silk, which did little to soften its horns, its teeth, its furrowed brow. Hashiba squinted at it, then laughed. “Well, I’m damned if I know what to get you for a wedding present. You name a gift that tops that mask and I’ll buy it.”
Shichio felt himself wince and quickly converted it into a coy smile. He couldn’t let Hashiba see how he’d come to fear the mask, and yet he hadn’t been able to leave the mask in their cabin, either. He wished he had. So long as they were behind closed doors, it was enough to let Hashiba ravage him. It wasn’t hard to tempt him into being a little rough. The mask would not be sated, but it could be distracted.
Shichio had wrapped it up in the hope that he could satisfy his unconscious need to hold it while avoiding the touch of its iron skin. He envied the mask; even in this heat, it would never sweat. He wanted nothing more than to disrobe it, to press its cool cheek against his own, but that was out of the question. This was no time to compromise self-control. He had a madwoman to bring to heel.
Seeing Hashiba’s expectant look, he said, “Gifts be damned. And let the wedding and the wife be damned too. Once I have her name, my mask and I come back home to serve their rightful lord.”
“Already thinking like a trueborn samurai,” Hashiba said with a wink. He smiled his impish, simian smile.
The palanquin’s woven bamboo window screens were no proof against the sweat-stink of the bearers, who grunted in time with each other as they plodded up the cliffside trail. “These commoners smell like animals,” Shichio said, grimacing. A tiny part of his mind insisted that the bearers’ parents probably worked a farm no different from the one Shichio had grown up on, but he would not dwell on that. Soon enough he would have rank, name, station, and esteem. He would be above the commoners for ever after.
At last the countless switchbacks took him to the top of the cliff trail, and through the window screen he could see the high white wall of the Okuma compound on his right. Soon to be my compound, he thought—very soon, in fact. That fact hung over him like the rain clouds he’d endured the day before, and so it was especially irksome to hear a runner coming from somewhere ahead. The man stopped to kneel beside the palanquin, panting like a horse. Delay after delay; it was the only way the lower classes could exert power over their betters.
Shichio slammed the sliding door aside and looked down upon the messenger kneeling in the weeds. “What do you think you’re doing, stopping your lord on the way to his wedding?”
The man bowed deeper. “General, your orders were to deliver any news of the Bear Cub, day or night.”
The Bear Cub? How could any word of him have reached Izu already? Shichio’s fleet had been the first to set sail after that storm, and it should have swept up all other ships in its net. No horseman could have outrun them.
He looked down at the mute messenger. “Well? Spit it out, boy.”
“My lord, the Bear Cub stormed the Yasuda compound last night. We lost fifty men.”
“Fifty?”
“He was said to have a rider with him. A ronin of some years.”
“No,” said Shichio. His spies on the Tokaido had reported that Daigoro and his haggard bodyguard had split ways at least a week past. His agent within the Wind said the boy had been alone when he hired his retinue to spirit him to Izu.
But this was not the first fantastic tale to have reached Shichio’s ears. Just this very morning a skiff had come alongside Hashiba’s flagship, delivering word that the Bear Cub had stolen a frigate after slaughtering the entire crew. It was preposterous, of course. Yes, the Okumas were a coastal power, but the boy was a cripple, not a seaman, and each of Shichio’s vessels was teeming with armed men. The whelp would need an army of pirates at his command. The tale was so ludicrous that Shichio had ordered a broadside into the skiff that delivered the message. He would have sunk the bastards for their cheek had Hashiba not heard the sudden cannonade and ordered a cease-fire.
Out of sheer magnanimity Shichio chose not to kill this messenger either. “The Yasuda garrison is playing tricks on you,” he told the kneeling man. “They take advantage of your gullibility.”
“My lord, they were most explicit: a young boy with an odachi and a lame leg—”
“Quit while you still have a tongue in your mouth.” Shichio had a sudden vision of blood oozing from the messenger’s mouth, and he realized his fingers had worked their way under the folds of Chinese silk. He was touching the mask.
He withdrew his hand as if the mask had bitten it. Hashiba frowned at him but said nothing. Shichio banged on the roof and the stinking, sweating bearers resumed their march.
When he reached the gate, Shichio was pleased by what he saw. House Okuma commanded a grand vista. Katto-ji, home to the abbot he was soon to kill, peered out from the pines on the next summit to the north. Below, on the saddle between the peaks, a double garrison was camped along the road flying Toyotomi colors. That road and the jetty were the only ways to reach the Okuma compound. Rumors be damned, Shichio thought. He would believe his eyes before he believed tales of captured frigates and samurai heroics, and his eyes saw no corpses lining the road, nor any pirate vessels anchored in the bay.