Ronin's Mistress Page 9

  Now Lord Asano understood that Kira was asking for a bribe. Objection lessened his fear. He was an honest man who deplored bribery. “I haven’t forgotten anything.”

  Kira sat back in surprised confusion. Oishi saw him wonder if Lord Asano was too stupid to take a hint, then realize that Lord Asano had deliberately defied him. “Very well,” he said in a voice coated with frost. “Suit yourself.”

  That night, when Oishi and Lord Asano dined alone together at Lord Asano’s estate in Edo, Oishi said, “You must bribe Kira.”

  “No,” Lord Asano said, even though his hands shook so hard with anxiety that he fumbled his chopsticks. “I won’t surrender like a coward.”

  “It’s my duty to advise you to bribe him and swallow your pride. If you don’t, Kira is bound to retaliate.”

  “Let him.”

  The next day, rehearsals for the ceremony began. As Lord Asano practiced marching up to the dais in the reception chamber where the imperial envoys would sit, Kira exclaimed, “You idiot! You’re supposed to take eighteen steps, not nineteen!”

  Lord Asano faltered. “You told me nineteen steps.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Kira grinned like a bully in a group of smaller children. He had the power of his position; he could destroy lives. Rumor said he’d done it often.

  “Yes, you did,” Oishi said from his place by the door. “I heard you, too.”

  He and Kira locked gazes. Oishi’s scowl told Kira that if he continued to play games with Lord Asano, he would have to reckon with Oishi. Kira responded with a sniff. His lessons continued to be so confusing, and so peppered with insults, that Lord Asano couldn’t learn the lines of his speech to the envoys.

  “If he slips up during the ceremony, it will reflect badly on you,” Oishi told Kira.

  “My reputation is unassailable,” Kira scoffed. “He will bear the blame for his mistakes.”

  It was true, as far as Oishi could see. If Lord Asano refused to take Kira’s bullying along with the instructions, he must meet the envoys without any idea what to do or say. The audience at the ceremony would witness and scorn his failure. Lord Asano toiled and suffered under Kira’s tutelage, while steadfastly refusing to give Kira a bribe.

  “Don’t let him get to you,” Oishi urged as Lord Asano practiced the ritual after the lessons, until late at night.

  But the advice was easier given than followed, especially when Kira tormented Lord Asano in public. At a banquet in the palace, Oishi and Lord Asano heard Kira say, “There’s the country boor. They apparently don’t learn any manners in Harima Province.”

  The other guests laughed. Lord Asano went pale with rage.

  Eventually, he snapped.

  * * *

  “I CAN’T DESCRIBE Lord Asano’s attack on Kira,” Oishi said. “I wasn’t there.”

  While listening to Oishi’s story, Sano had found himself too caught up in it to judge it. Oishi had a talent for bringing characters to vivid life. Sano had experienced outrage at Kira’s behavior and sympathy toward Lord Asano. Which was what Oishi had intended, Sano realized now, as they sat together in Lord Hosokawa’s office.

  “Your story offers a logical explanation for why Lord Asano attacked Kira and puts you in a good light,” Sano said. “But is it the true one?”

  “It’s true,” Oishi said, unruffled by Sano’s skepticism.

  Sano began to understand how Oishi had become the leader of the forty-seven rōnin. Oishi was a powerful personality. Sano must take care to avoid falling under his thrall. “After the attack, why didn’t Lord Asano say what his quarrel with Kira was?”

  “Put yourself in Lord Asano’s position. You were picked on by an old man; you were too weak to make him treat you with respect. Would you want everyone to know? Wouldn’t you rather take it to your grave?”

  “That’s a good point.”

  “Besides, Lord Asano knew that explaining why he attacked Kira wouldn’t have saved him. He drew a weapon inside Edo Castle. He was going to die. Telling shameful tales on himself wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  “It might have made one very important difference,” Sano said. “Kira might have been punished for starting a feud with Lord Asano.”

  “Kira was punished.” Triumph resounded in Oishi’s harsh voice. “Lord Asano knew he could depend on me to see that the bastard got his comeuppance.”

  “But you took almost two years to do it.” This was another issue that Sano wanted to resolve, in case it had any bearing on the truth about the murder and relevance to the supreme court’s verdict. “Why did you wait so long?”

  “I’m getting to that.” Memory coalesced in his eyes, like a flock of ravens gathering around carrion, as Oishi began the next episode in his story.

  11

  1701 April

  LANTERNS GLOWED IN a courtyard, around a square of straw mats covered with a white rug. Lord Asano knelt on the rug, dressed in a white silk robe. A table before him held a short sword on a stand and a scroll bearing the poem he’d written. His youthful face was rigid with terror, misery, and his effort to withhold an unseemly display of emotions. Oishi stood behind Lord Asano, concealing his own anguish behind a grim expression, his sword drawn. Along the courtyard, government officials stood silent under the unearthly radiance of blossoming cherry trees. Petals fell like pink snow, symbols of life’s transience.

  Lord Asano opened his robe with hands that shook violently. His ragged breathing was the only sound in the cool, quiet night. As Oishi looked down at Lord Asano, he wasn’t sure he could perform his part in the ritual. But it would be his last service for his beloved lord, and perform it he must. Hoping that Lord Asano’s last words would give him strength, Oishi glanced at the poem.

  More than the cherry blossoms,

  Inviting a wind to blow them away,

  I am wondering what to do

  With the remaining springtime.

  Tears almost blinded Oishi. That his master wouldn’t live to see the rest of the spring! Justice had been meted out with terrible efficiency. This morning Lord Asano had drawn a sword inside Edo Castle. This afternoon the shogun had ruled that Lord Asano must die tonight.

  Lord Asano reached for the sword. He grasped the hilt in both hands, the weapon pointed at his abdomen. The blade wavered. Straining to hold it still, he looked up at Oishi.

  A memory seized Oishi. In the Asano clan stronghold of Ako Castle, the previous Lord Asano lay dying. His family and top retainers watched him draw his last breath. Oishi looked across the bed at Lord Asano’s son, the eight-year-old boy who had just become daimyo. The boy turned solemn, frightened, pleading eyes on Oishi, his special friend among his father’s men. Oishi nodded, telling the new Lord Asano that he would be there to guide him and protect him for his whole life. I will do right by you. And Lord Asano nodded, reassured.

  Twenty-two years later, Oishi saw the same pleading in Lord Asano’s eyes. Love and heartache flooded Oishi. He nodded. Lord Asano nodded, turned away, and sat straighter. Uttering a loud cry, he thrust the blade into his gut.

  Oishi beheaded Lord Asano before he could feel any pain. Blood spattered the poem. The audience gasped. Cherry blossoms fell. Oishi gazed down at the corpse of his master, and rage burned through his grief. He silently vowed, I will do right by you.

  By the next month, the government had dissolved the house of Asano, officially wiping the clan out of existence. Family members huddled inside Ako Castle while Oishi and the thousands of other retainers massed atop the walls and watched troops marching toward the castle. The men clamored in outrage: “We’ll fight!”

  “Don’t be fools!” Oishi shouted. “There are too many of them! We’ll be slaughtered! We must live to avenge Lord Asano!”

  Although the men grumbled, they allowed Oishi to herd them from the castle. They stood beside their horses, their possessions in the saddlebags. Oishi led out the Asano family, thankful that Lord Asano’s wife needn’t see this. She was in Edo, where the law forced daimyo wives to res
ide as hostages to their husbands’ good behavior. So were Oishi’s own wife and children. Oishi helped the Asano family into oxcarts piled with the few belongings they were allowed to keep. The women and children sobbed.

  So did many retainers as they watched the army arrive. This was the worst day of their life, every samurai’s worst nightmare. Oishi couldn’t believe it was happening to him. He stared in mute shock as troops filed into the castle and filed out carrying furniture, trunks of money, and priceless heirlooms. No one in the Asano group could bear to watch, but everyone stayed until the next day, when the loot was borne off to Edo to be received by the shogun and the army was gone except for a platoon that occupied the castle. Then they faced the terrible moment they’d been dreading.

  They were homeless, destitute. The retainers were rōnin, stripped of honor, utterly humiliated. They turned to Oishi, even though he was no longer their superior.

  “Where are we going to go?” they cried.

  “To Edo,” Oishi said. “We have work to do there.”

  But as the procession moved down the highway, it shrank. Some men stayed at teahouses in the villages to find comfort in drink and the arms of prostitutes. Some went off to seek their fortunes alone. Suicides drastically thinned the ranks. The procession left a string of graves in its wake. Oishi arrived in Edo with only a hundred men left. The government seized the Asano estate in Edo. Oishi put Lady Asano in a Buddhist convent and moved his family to lodgings in the Nihonbashi merchant quarter. Then he began a campaign to get the house of Asano reinstated. He wrote letters to government officials. He called in every favor. Nothing worked. His contacts said the shogun couldn’t change his mind because that would make him look weak, and he would never reinstate the house of Asano. They told Oishi to make the best of his new life as a commoner.

  Instead, Oishi turned his attention to his next duty. One day he walked to Kira’s estate. He was so consumed by murderous rage that he could feel his heart burning black. Kira had brought about Lord Asano’s destruction. Oishi must make Kira pay.

  But Kira evidently expected the Asano rōnin to try to kill him. Guards ringed the estate. Oishi saw Kira come out, accompanied by fifty soldiers. Oishi kept surveillance on Kira long enough to know that he never let down his guard. Revenge seemed impossible.

  Oishi fell into a state of deep despair. He began drinking because wine eased his pain. He frequented teahouses and stayed out all night. The change in him infuriated his wife.

  “You’re disgusting! What’s the matter with you?” Ukihashi demanded. She’d once been a pretty, sedate woman, but losing her home, her social status, and her servants had made her wretched and shrill. “I know you’re upset, but what about us?” She waved her hand at their two little daughters and their fourteen-year-old son. The children sat by a cold hearth, eating millet, the food of poor people. “Have you forgotten that you have a family to support?”

  “Shut up!” Oishi couldn’t bear her criticism. “Leave me alone.”

  They quarreled every day until Oishi said, “I’ve had enough. I’m leaving.”

  “Good riddance,” Ukihashi said bitterly.

  Oishi made Chikara go with him. He divorced his wife before he left Edo. It was summer, more than a year after Lord Asano’s death. He and Chikara went to Miyako. They earned their rice by working as bodyguards for a merchant, living behind the shop. Oishi continued drinking. At the Ichiriki teahouse he met a beautiful young prostitute named Okaru. With her he found the first pleasure he’d experienced since Lord Asano’s death.

  After too many drunken binges, his employer threw him out. Oishi couldn’t afford to pay Okaru. He couldn’t ask his son for the money, because Chikara hated Okaru, hated that Oishi had broken up their family. Father and son became estranged.

  Okaru said, “You needn’t pay me anymore. I love you. I’ll take care of you.”

  Oishi loved her, too; she made him feel young and hopeful again. He moved into her lodgings. Okaru continued to entertain her customers. Oishi lived on her. She pampered him, but he couldn’t make peace with his circumstances. One day he got so drunk that he collapsed on the street. Passersby jeered. A man stood over him and said, “Oishi-san? Is that you?”

  His square, pugnacious face was vaguely familiar. Oishi couldn’t recall his name but recognized him as a merchant from Satsuma.

  “Why are you lying in the gutter? What happened?” Catching a whiff of liquor, the Satsuma man recoiled in disgust. “The rumors are true, then. You’ve become a bum.”

  He announced, “This is Oishi Kuranosuke, former retainer of Lord Asano. He doesn’t have the courage to avenge his master’s death. Faithless beast!” He trampled on Oishi and spat in his face. “You are unworthy of the name of samurai!”

  A crowd joined in the taunting, kicking, and spitting. The pain brought Oishi to his senses. Something within him shifted, like fractured ground settling back into place after an earthquake. That day was the last time he ever drank. That day he vowed to fulfill the promise he’d made to Lord Asano. That day he began his journey toward vengeance and redemption.

  * * *

  “YOU KNOW THE rest,” Oishi said to Sano.

  They gazed at each other across Lord Hosokawa’s desk, like two generals across a battlefield. “Not quite,” Sano said. “It’s a long way from a gutter in Miyako to a slaughter in Edo.”

  Once more he’d become thoroughly engaged in Oishi’s tale, against his will because it had taken him to places he didn’t want to go. He’d always wondered how he would handle the most extreme situations a samurai could face. What would it be like to assist in the ritual suicide of someone he loved as much as Oishi had apparently loved Lord Asano?

  Sano didn’t know whether he could do it.

  How would it be to feel such love for his lord that he would give up his family and dedicate his life to revenge?

  In his deepest heart Sano admitted that he didn’t love the shogun. He didn’t know whether he could follow the Way of the Warrior that far. He felt caught between admiration for Oishi, who had proved himself truer to Bushido than most samurai ever did, and antagonism toward Oishi for exposing his own fears and self-doubts.

  “Fill in the gaps in your story,” Sano ordered.

  “In the summer of the year after Lord Asano died, I went looking for his other retainers,” Oishi said. “I gathered forty-six of them together, including my son.”

  Could Sano lead his own son down the same dangerous path that Oishi had led Chikara? That hardly bore imagining. But it was a son’s duty to follow his father. Sano and Masahiro came from a long line of fathers and sons who’d marched into battle together. But would Sano bring Masahiro in on an illegal vendetta, a crime? Shouldn’t a father protect his child?

  “I told my comrades that it was time to avenge Lord Asano,” Oishi went on. “We formed a conspiracy. It took almost six months to set our plans. Then we walked to Edo, which took us another two months. When we got here, we rested for a few days. Then we went after Kira.”

  Sano saw a battle raging during a snowstorm, as if Oishi’s memory had brought the scene into the room. He blinked to dispel the vision. He got a firm grip on his objectivity. “You left something out.”

  An annoyed frown crossed Oishi’s face. “What?”

  “Your mistress. Okaru. She loved you and cared for you and bedded other men to support you. You left her behind in Miyako. Or so you thought. She’s here in town.”

  Oishi’s slanted eyebrows flew up in alarm. “No. She can’t be.”

  “Why aren’t you happy to hear that the woman you love is near?” Sano asked.

  Oishi massaged his jaw with his fingers. Sano sensed that Oishi wanted time to think about how this development might affect him.

  “She followed you to Edo,” Sano said.

  “How do you know?” Oishi asked.

  “She wrote a letter to my wife.” Sano explained what the letter had said, then mentioned Reiko’s visit with Okaru.

  Oishi spat ou
t his breath, shook his head. “She thought she could save me. She’s so naïve, and so wrong.”

  “Maybe not wrong. As you must have guessed by now, there’s some confusion about what to do with you and your comrades.” Sano told Oishi about the controversy in the government, the formation of the supreme court. He watched Oishi massage his jaw harder. “Whether you live or die depends on whether I find evidence to prove that your actions were justified even though you broke the law.”

  “What does this have to do with Okaru?” Oishi asked.

  “Okaru is a witness in my investigation. She’s offered the first evidence in your favor.”

  Distrust narrowed Oishi’s eyes. “What evidence?”

  “She told my wife that the vendetta isn’t as simple as it appears.” Sano had a distinct, puzzling impression that this prospect of a reprieve disturbed Oishi although it should please him. “She said you told her so.”

  Oishi sat perfectly still and calm, but Sano perceived shock reverberating through him like a gunshot in a tunnel. “What else did Okaru say I said?”

  “Nothing else.” Was that relief Sano saw in Oishi’s hooded eyes? “She claims you refused to explain what you meant. Perhaps you would explain it to me now.”

  “I can’t.”

  Sano was incredulous because Oishi didn’t jump at the chance to put his actions in a better light. “Not even to save yourself and your comrades?”

  “I actually don’t remember saying that to Okaru.” A crestfallen grin flexed Oishi’s thick mouth. “I was drunk most of the time I was with her. I did a lot of incoherent rambling. She must be mistaken.”

  “My wife says Okaru seemed sure of what she’d heard.”

  Oishi thrust out his jaw; belligerence flared his nostrils wider. “The vendetta is exactly what it seems: Kira destroyed Lord Asano. My comrades and I destroyed Kira. We abided by the samurai code of honor. It’s as straightforward as that.”