Laura Rowland: The Iris Fan

“He’ll let you take the entire blame rather than admit you acted on his orders and be put to death along with you,” Detective Marume said.

That was Bushido, too: Loyalty didn’t cut both ways. Emotions flickered across their faces as the four men stared down Sano and Marume. Sano detected fear, confusion, and something oddly sly in their expressions. The wind keened. The lantern’s flames hissed as snowflakes hit them. In the instant that Sano realized what was going to happen, the four men drew their swords and charged.

Sano and Marume barely had time to draw their own weapons before the men were upon them. Horses collided, whinnied, and reared. Sano lashed out. His sword cleaved falling snowflakes. The lanterns attached to his back and the other men’s swung crazily. He glimpsed his opponents in flashes-a red embossed breastplate; a chain-mailed arm; Ono’s snarling face. Everything was dark except where the light momentarily touched. Sano’s poor night vision put him at a serious disadvantage. His opponents flew at him out of nowhere. A blade struck his helmet, and the metallic clang shuddered his skull. He dodged and swung frantically. This was his first battle in more than four years. He practiced martial arts every morning, but real combat was different, not bound by rules, chaotic. And although Sano had won battles in which he was hugely outnumbered, he was older now. Maybe he could beat Manabe, but he couldn’t outmatch the three younger samurai whose vision was sharper, reflexes quicker, and stamina greater.

Marume yelled. Lights swung. In their path appeared a brief image of Marume covered with blood, arms thrown out, falling. Sano was horrified, and not just because Marume was his only ally tonight and among the few retainers he had left; he’d discharged the others when he was demoted and his government stipend reduced. Marume had been his friend for twenty years. Heedless of his own safety, Sano leapt off his mount. He faltered through the tumult of hooves pounding and blades slicing at him, desperate to save Marume.

Marume staggered up from the ground. “I’m all right! My horse was cut.”

The other men jumped off their horses. Kuzawa grabbed Sano from behind. Sano struggled, but he couldn’t break the young man’s grip. Setsubara and Ono wrestled Marume to the ground. His face red with horse blood, Marume shouted curses. Setsubara and Ono bound his wrists. Kuzawa tied Sano’s wrists so tight that the rope cut into his flesh. Sano glared helplessly at Manabe.

“Four against two-are you really that stupid?” Manabe scoffed. He told his men, “We’ll take them to Lord Ienobu. He’ll want to deal with them personally.”

The men boosted Sano and Marume onto Sano’s horse, knotted rope around them so they couldn’t escape, and confiscated the swords they’d dropped.

“You think you know so much, but you don’t know anything,” Manabe said with a pitying look at Sano. “You’re going to wish you’d minded your own business.”

Escorted by Ienobu’s men, Sano entered Edo some three hours before midnight. He was glad of the bad weather; there was no one around to see him and Marume tied onto his horse like captured criminals and to throw stones.

Edo, home to a million citizens, still showed the effects from the eruption of Mount Fuji two years ago. The sky had rained sand and pebbles all night and by morning the city was ankle-deep in ash. Houses built since the great earthquake five years ago were grimy with ash that the wind still blew in from the mountains. The ash turned the wet snow on the streets and the tile roofs gray.

The castle occupied a hill that rose above the city, its buildings constructed on ascending tiers up to the peak. Lights shone from the windows of covered corridors atop the retaining walls around each tier. Snowflakes scintillated in the lights and swirled around the guard towers. The castle looked like hazy rings of golden stars between layers of darkness. Sano had once lived there but hadn’t been inside since he’d been banned from court. When they reached the moat, Manabe’s men untied Sano and Marume. They left Marume to ride home and marched Sano up to the gate. Sano looked back on twenty years of some difficult but mostly good times inside this fortress. Here he’d brought Reiko as his bride and they’d fallen in love. Both their children had been born here. He’d risen from the shogun’s chief investigator to chamberlain and second-in-command.

This wasn’t like coming home. It was like entering the enemy camp. The good times were over, his family life in shambles.

Sentries opened the gate. Manabe walked Sano up through stone-walled passages to the shogun’s heir’s residence in the western fortress, on the tier of the hill just below the palace at the peak. The building had white-plastered, half-timbered walls, wings connected by corridors, and a curved tile roof. Icicles on pine trees outside dripped water on snow-glazed grass. Flames burned in stone lanterns along the gravel path. Here Yoshisato had died in the fire that had burned down the residence more than four years ago. Rebuilt, it was now home to Lord Ienobu.

Manabe’s three henchmen guarded Sano in the courtyard while Manabe went to notify Lord Ienobu. Soon Manabe escorted Sano into the reception chamber, a long room with a lattice-and-paper wall on one side and wooden sliding exterior doors opposite. Two men sat on a dais furnished with gold-inlaid metal lanterns and satin brocade cushions, backed by a mural that depicted a garden of brilliant red and orange peonies on a gold background.

“Here we go again, Sano- san ,” Lord Ienobu said. “You keep disobeying my orders and getting caught.” With his stunted figure, jutting elbows, and the hump on his back, dressed in a green and gold kimono, he blended into the mural behind him-a cricket amid the flowers. He looked much older than his forty-eight years. His upper teeth protruded above a tiny lower jaw; his deformities stemmed from a hereditary, painful bone condition. “When are you going to learn your lesson?” His tight, raspy voice sounded squeezed out of him, like a cricket’s chirp. In the two years since Sano had last seen him, he’d gained weight, as if fattened by a rich diet of power. Maybe he looked more like a maggot, Sano thought. “Are you getting slow on the uptake in your old age?”

Manabe pushed Sano to his knees. Charcoal braziers under the tatami floor breathed heat through iron grilles, but Sano, chilled to the bone, took no comfort from it. Angry at the futility of his own stubbornness as well as at Ienobu for mocking and punishing him, Sano said, “When are you going to stop denying that you’re responsible for Yoshisato’s death? Do you really think you can get away with it forever?”

Ienobu grimaced in impatience. “I am not responsible. That woman Korika set the fire.”

“She said in her dying confession that you put her up to it,” Sano said.

Chamberlain Yanagisawa, the other man on the dais, responded in a suave voice, “And who heard this dying confession?”

“My wife,” Sano said. His temper boiled at the challenge from Yanagisawa.

They’d been enemies for twenty years. From the outset Yanagisawa had viewed Sano as his rival for political power, and he’d developed an extreme hatred toward Sano. Sano’s own antagonism toward Yanagisawa stemmed from Yanagisawa’s attacks on him and his family. Their feud had escalated when Yanagisawa had tried to pass his son off as the shogun’s son. It was a fraud that Sano couldn’t let slide even though the shogun had accepted Yoshisato, the cuckoo’s egg. Not only would Yanagisawa’s gaining control over the regime mean doom for Sano, it was a crime against the lord that Sano was duty-bound to serve. Bushido demanded that Sano redress it no matter that Yoshisato was dead. And now Yanagisawa was committing yet another breach of honor by allying with Ienobu, the man responsible for the murders of both Yoshisato and the shogun’s daughter.