Hideyoshi looked over his shoulder to the peacock—no, Daigoro thought, correcting himself: to General Shichio. He could almost hear Katsushima chiding him. Make the slightest misstep and this man will have your head. Best be careful.
“You see?” the regent told Shichio. “The monk is no threat.”
“We’ve come an awfully long way just to take this boy’s word for it,” Shichio said with a sneer. His voice was so soft that he could barely be heard past the dais, yet Daigoro noticed he used none of the honorifics one would expect in speaking to a man second only to the emperor in rank. Was it because Hideyoshi was so informal that he didn’t require such niceties? Or was it the pride of a preening peacock?
Hideyoshi shrugged. “Lord Okuma,” he said, “I’m sure you understand my concerns. I’ve given an execution order. You haven’t followed it. Even a common platoon sergeant cannot abide disobedience from his troops. In my office insubordination looms larger still.”
“Yes, my lord regent.”
“But I respect your title, your name, and your authority. It does me no good to strip a daimyo’s sovereignty over his fief. I have no use for your anger; what I want is your loyalty. And there’s my problem. The easy solution is to kill you, kill this monk, and sail back home. I’ve killed disobedient daimyo before. So remind me, Lord Okuma, how is it that you show me loyalty by refusing to carry out my will?”
“My lord regent has no desire for enemies in Izu,” Daigoro said, then stopped himself. The abbot’s warning about General Shichio echoed in his mind: this was a man who reshaped words like clay. Daigoro’s answer could already be reinterpreted as a veiled threat; he chose his next words more carefully.
“The abbot is a very popular man. He presides over the funerals of every family within three days’ ride of here. Parents are known to travel twenty ri just to have him bless their babies. Killing him is certain to raise the farmers’ ire, my lord regent; any daimyo who killed him would have a hard time collecting taxes.”
“I see,” said Hideyoshi, but Shichio leaned forward and whispered something in his ear.
“Sir, I agree with Lord Okuma,” said the giant. He shifted to face his liege lord. “It is no secret that you plan to move against the Hojos. Create a disturbance among the northern daimyo and you only create allies for the enemy.”
“And yet disobedience is disobedience,” said Hideyoshi. Shichio gave a little nod. Daigoro wondered whose words had just come from the regent’s mouth.
“Sir,” said the giant, “there is disobedience and then there is obeying the spirit of a command without obeying it to the letter.”
“Why, General Mio,” Shichio said, “I hadn’t expected hairsplitting from you.”
“And I hadn’t expected you to sail the command fleet halfway across the empire to indulge a petty grudge. Someday you’ll have to tell me why this monk is so important to you.”
The peacock glowered. The giant, Mio, shifted again where he sat, rotating to face Daigoro. “Lord Okuma, we have your word that no one outside this Katto-ji will ever see the abbot in question again?”
“On my own life, Mio-dono, you have my word.”
“He will speak with no one outside his monastery?”
“Yes, Mio-dono.”
“And what of visitors to the monastery? Will he speak with them?”
Daigoro bowed low. “My lord regent has only to tell me his preference and I will make it law. Toyotomi-dono, please understand, the abbot had the utmost respect for my departed father. He could have taken the tonsure anywhere, and chose to do it at Katto-ji in order to be close to my father and learn from him. If I command him to a lifetime of silence, he will obey.”
General Mio opened his mouth to ask another question, but Shichio cut him off. Speaking loudly for the first time, he said, “It seems to me that if this man is so beloved by the people, then confining him to his monastery will be no more popular than having him killed. In fact, it may be worse; force him into a vow of silence and he will either violate it or else anger the people further by being present yet refusing to speak to them. So what benefit is it to leave him alive?”
Daigoro’s stomach clenched. He had no answer to that. Outfoxed by a peacock, he thought.
But Mio answered for him. “General Shichio speaks directly to my point,” said the giant. “For all intents and purposes, the abbot is dead to the world. Lord Okuma was not disobedient. He fulfilled the spirit of the regent’s command as fully as anyone could ask of him.”
“No,” said Shichio. “To carry it out fully would be to deliver a bald head in a box.”
“My lord regent,” Daigoro said, his heart pounding; he’d never interrupted commanders of this station before. “The abbot himself offered me just that solution. I turned him down.”
Hideyoshi fixed his overlarge eyes on Daigoro. “Did you? Well, look at the balls on this one.” He laughed and said, “Explain yourself, Lord Okuma.”
“My lord regent, my father told me many times that when we are faced with choosing between taking an easy path and taking a hard one, the path of bushido is almost never the easy path.”
A knowing smile touched Hideyoshi’s lips. “I remember him. I met him only briefly, but I remember thinking, ‘Now this one is a samurai.’”
“He was the best,” said Daigoro.
“You misunderstand me,” said Hideyoshi. “He was an impressive man, your father. The consummate samurai. But this honor of his—this honor of yours—never made the slightest bit of sense to me.”
Daigoro was confused. He was sure his ears had deceived him. He could not have heard the regent, a man the emperor himself had raised to the station of samurai, admit he didn’t believe in honor. It was impossible. Wasn’t it?
Hideyoshi went on. “I’ll grant you, I wasn’t born into all this honor nonsense, but even if I had been, I’m still not sure I would understand it any better. How did it become fashionable to prefer death to disloyalty? Why not praise self-interest? Why not ambition? Aren’t people better suited to pursue their own interests anyhow?”
“I’ve never thought of it that way,” Daigoro said honestly. To him the dictates of honor were as indisputable as the stars in the heavens. They were not something one questioned; they simply were. Those who navigated without them did so at their peril. But Hideyoshi had it right as welclass="underline" left to their own devices, human beings would surely pursue their own selfish interests, wouldn’t they?
“Think on it,” said Hideyoshi. “I defy you to explain why I should live within the straits of this thing you call honor. Wouldn’t your life be easier without it? Here you are, right in the dragon’s den, and yet if you had killed that monk as I ordered, you and I would never have met. In fact, if you weren’t so damned honor-bound, you could have sent along any old head, neh? You could have lied and saved your skin. Yet here you are. I can kill you at whim. Your honor makes you weaker than me, doesn’t it?”
Daigoro could almost feel the energy bristling from General Mio—and not just from Mio, but from Katsushima too. Both of them were born samurai and both were too incensed to speak. They gave off heat like a pair of volcanoes. Was Hideyoshi goading them? Was he goading Daigoro? Or was he really so ignorant of what it meant to be samurai?
“My lord, I think I am weaker than you,” Daigoro said at last. “But not because of my honor. I am weaker because my influence is smaller. I have a few hundred warriors at my command; you have hundreds of thousands. And yes, I believe you have it right: I think men are naturally inclined not to be honorable but to be selfish. But that is precisely why honor is important; it bids us to transcend ourselves. Without it, we are only clever animals. With it, we can be better than our animal instincts allow us to be.”