The first salvo from the archers fell short. They adjusted their aim and shot again, loosing haphazardly now, no longer in unison. Still the Bear Cub stood his ground, and with a deft swipe from that massive sword, he struck ten arrows right out of the air.
It was impossible. The boy must have been part cat; how else could he have seen an arrow in the dark? The thought of deflecting ten of them sent the lieutenant’s head spinning. At last he understood why General Shichio deployed fifty men to dispatch a single teenage boy.
Still his men had not formed ranks. He knew they were well trained, knew it was only the heat of the moment that confounded his mind, but to him his unit seemed to be wading through water. “Pick up your feet, you damned sluggards! Move!”
At last the Bear Cub turned to run. The lieutenant could wait no longer. He led the first platoon himself, commanding the rest to follow as soon as they managed to form up. His archers fell in behind him, dropping their bows in favor of swords.
He was the first to reach the fallen scout, who still attempted to crawl, dragging his legs uselessly behind him. The man seemed so small. “Easy,” the lieutenant said. “Easy, soldier.” He crouched beside the scout and sent the rest of his platoon around the bend in the road. “Report. What are you doing out here alone?”
“Not alone,” grunted the scout, his head hanging heavily between his shoulders. He clutched the lieutenant’s sword belt as if trying to pull himself upright. “My patrol. All killed. Ran us down outside the Okuma compound. Killed us all.”
A prayer for mercy escaped the lieutenant’s lips unbidden. He did not want to believe in boys with magic swords and cat’s eyes, but what else could explain what he’d seen tonight? There, twenty paces ahead, he spied another corpse along the roadway, lying facedown in the weeds and clad in Toyotomi colors. How many more littered this road? Could the Bear Cub have felled an entire patrol?
“You men, up here!” barked the lieutenant, his voice echoing off the Green Cliff. The remainder of his force came running, save the eight men reassigned to guard the door. “Our quarry is out there in these hills,” he said when they reached him. “Watch yourselves; this one is as dangerous as they come. Half of you, over the hill. The rest, take the road.”
The limp-legged scout still clung to the lieutenant’s belt, trying to pull himself up though he lacked even the strength to raise his own head. He seemed to weigh nothing at all. The lieutenant hadn’t even seen the scout’s face yet, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He felt a pang of guilt for wanting to leave this man to die on his own, a warrior who had served his daimyo well. He felt even worse for not charging out to meet the enemy with the rest of his troops, who vanished over the hillcrest or around the bend in the road even as he watched them. He should have been at their head, facing the same danger, running the same risks as the two who now lay in the road, one dead and the other dying.
“Easy, son,” the lieutenant said, not knowing what else to say.
“Much easier than I thought,” the scout said, and he thrust a knife into the lieutenant’s chin.
• • •
Daigoro did not let go of the knife because he wasn’t sure the lieutenant was dead.
He’d expected to feel a great swell of shame and self-loathing after such skullduggery, but the sad and simple truth was that Daigoro was exhausted, and stabbing a defenseless man was much easier than facing him sword to sword. Later, he thought, he’d try to convince himself that deceit on the battlefield was no stain on one’s honor, and that his ruse with this lieutenant was no different than his father’s ruse with the “ghost army” that defeated Shichio and Hideyoshi. For now, it was enough that he was still alive, and that his enemy was either dead or dying, depending on how far the knife had gone up into his brain.
He gave a quick, low whistle. Twenty paces up the road, a dead body in Toyotomi colors got to its feet and picked its way out of the weeds. It was the shinobi, who moments before had made this lieutenant believe he was the infamous Bear Cub, then batted a volley of arrows aside, then transformed himself into a Toyotomi corpse, all without effort. He’d even draped his lifeless form over Glorious Victory Unsought, concealing it from all the troops that dashed past him in pursuit of a Bear Cub they would not find.
“I don’t know how you managed that trick with the arrows,” Daigoro told him, “but that was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
The shinobi ignored the compliment. “Your sword. Too big for you.”
Daigoro nodded and shrugged. “That sword is too big for anyone.”
“Stronger than you look. Impressive.”
For a fleeting moment, Daigoro’s fear and fatigue lifted from him. An exchange of mutual respect, between himself and the deadliest man he’d ever encountered. Daigoro had to stop and think for a moment just to be sure it had happened. Then the moment passed, and Daigoro remembered the weight of what he needed to do.
He and the shinobi made a show of caring for the lieutenant, for the benefit of the Toyotomis still manning the gate. At this distance they would need eagle’s eyes to notice their lieutenant was now the wounded one and their fallen scout had sprung miraculously to life. They would see only three men, one of them hanging between the other two like a field-dressed deer. With that disguise in place, Daigoro made the long walk to the Green Cliff.
At the gate all eyes were on the grisly form of the lieutenant. The cloying stench of his blood tainted the smoke and ash from the cookfires. Together they stank of hell. Hinges wailed like tortured spirits as the Toyotomis put their shoulders into the gates. Then the lieutenant wailed too, giving Daigoro such a start that he nearly dropped the man. Somehow the lieutenant still clung to life, and also to his duty. He tried in vain to warn his garrison of the ruse, but with the knife pinning his jaws shut, he could only moan loud and long. It sounded like his ghost leaving his body, and between that, the wailing gates, and the smells of blood and fire, to Daigoro’s weary mind the gate to House Yasuda had become the gates of hell.
He kept his head low and tried to take an accurate count of the enemy. Crunching on the gravel were eight pairs of booted feet. His own shadow stretched before him, bound to that of the lieutenant and the shinobi, as if the whole concatenous mass were the shadow of some hideous six-legged demon. Somehow the vision gave him strength: if this was hell, then at least he was the demon.
“Bar the gate,” he said. “We can’t let that Bear Cub get inside.”
He waited until he heard the bar drop before he drew steel. He killed the first of the eight with his wakizashi, then drew Glorious Victory from the lieutenant’s back. Together, Daigoro and the shinobi made short work of the rest.
56
Yasuda Jinbei had never been a large man, and illness had withered him even further. His cheeks were sharper than Daigoro remembered, as if the bones pushed through his skin with a mind of their own. His thin hands lay folded across his blanket, and there too the sallow skin sagged between the hollows of the bones. His white hair splayed limply across his pillow like a fan. The sight of it made Daigoro think of General Mio, and his mind reeled away from the memory of Mio’s terrible wounds, fixating instead on the image of the giant man gleaming in his black armor, his hair as white as the snow atop Mount Fuji. By comparison, Lord Yasuda’s hair seemed yellow, faded, brittle. His pale eyebrows were in the grips of a permanent, pain-ridden scowl.