Laura Rowland: The Incense Game

Sano was so distraught he could barely stammer his name and rank. “My wife. I have to find her. Get out of my way!”

“There’s nobody else here.” The man had a permanently suntanned face like a farmer’s, but his crown was shaved, his hair in a topknot. He wore a jitte — an iron rod with a prong at the hilt for catching the blade of an attacker’s sword, standard equipment for police He was a local doshin. The two men with him looked to be his civilian assistants.

“Then where is she?” Sano demanded.

“She must have been the lady that was seen riding through the village today,” the doshin said in the satisfied tone of a police officer who’d fitted together facts of a crime. “Those dead samurai must be her guards. She came to see old Kasane, according to her nephew. He came in and found this.” The doshin shook his head at the bloody scene. “There are reports of another group of mounted samurai in the area. They were probably r o nin bandits. They must have broken in here and killed Kasane and your wife’s guards.”

Sano didn’t have time to correct the doshin ’s impression. He had to look for Reiko. Maybe she’d managed to run away from Minister Ogyu and his troops.

Maybe they’d caught her, and her dead body was lying in a field.

Banishing the thought, Sano started toward the door. A gurgling noise stopped him. It sounded as if someone were calling his name under water. One of the doshin ’s assistants said, “Hey, that one’s alive!”

Sano crouched beside the fallen man who’d spoken. The man’s armor tunic was drenched with blood. Sano was aghast to see what he’d not noticed before: The man’s face had been mutilated. So had the faces of the dead men. Their noses had been cut off, their eyes, cheeks, and mouths crisscrossed with slashes. Minister Ogyu must have disfigured them in an attempt to obscure their identities.

“Who are you?” Sano grasped the man’s hand.

Blood frothed around the hole that had been his nose as the man breathed. His hand squeezed Sano’s. His cut lips moved in a whisper. “Tanuma.”

He was Reiko’s chief bodyguard. Sano said urgently, “Where is Reiko?”

“Ogyu.” Tanuma’s eyes were swollen shut, their lids covered with blood, leaking muddy fluid. “Took her.” His pierced lungs gurgled as they sucked air. “Couldn’t. Stop. Him.”

“She’s alive, then?” Caught between eagerness to believe it and fear of disappointment, Sano said, “Where did Ogyu take her?” He felt Tanuma’s grip on his hand, and on life, weakening.

“Saru-waka-cho.” Tanuma exhaled for the last time.

Inside the theater, Minister Ogyu knelt at the end of the stage where Reiko sat. His soft features were set in lines of unhappy resignation. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.” His gaze fixed on a point above her head, as if he were unable to look directly at her. “Things just spun out of control.”

He sounded as if eight people had died without any involvement from him! Angry words leaped into Reiko’s mind, but she held her tongue, afraid to antagonize Minister Ogyu.

“Life is a path that one must walk, sometimes regardless of one’s wishes. My path was determined the day I was born. I was the only child. They wanted an heir to carry on our family name and bring honor to our clan.” Pride and tears glistened in Minister Ogyu’s eyes. “They didn’t let nature stand in their way.”

This was the only admission of his true sex that he would ever make, Reiko thought. She listened while frantically trying to think of how to turn him away from this destructive path along which he was taking her.

“They never let down their discipline. ‘Eat more! Get bigger! Talk deeper in your throat. Never cry! Don’t be a sissy!’” His voice imitated an angry woman’s. “I did everything they wanted. All the acting and pretending. Even when I thought it would kill me.” A spasm disfigured the right side of Minister Ogyu’s face. He groaned. “What choice did I have? According to Confucius, whose teachings I began studying as soon as I learned to read, duty to my parents was my highest duty.”

Reiko remembered Sano telling her that Minister Ogyu’s parents were dead. She risked a comment that might lead him to realize the error of his ways. “When your parents died, there was no need to pretend anymore. You could have stopped.”

“When I was young, I used to think that when they were gone, I would go someplace far away, and live all by myself, and be however I wanted, and nobody would care.” He spoke as if he hadn’t heard Reiko, but his thoughts had followed the same course as hers. “But my duty to them didn’t end with their deaths. One also has a duty to one’s ancestors. And by the time my parents died, it was too late for me to change. I had my position at the academy. I was a married man. I had my wife and children to consider.”

Anguish added to the suffering on his face. “I didn’t do it only to protect myself. I did it to protect them, too.”

“I understand. Madam Usugumo found you out-she was a threat to your wife and children,” Reiko said. “She had to be silenced.”

“She discovered my secret. I had to silence her.” Again he echoed Reiko’s words without seeming to hear them. “But I hadn’t the courage. I gave my wife the poisoned incense. She did what I should have.”

Reiko was astonished. Lady Ogyu, not her husband, had actually murdered the women at the incense game.

“But Madam Usugumo wasn’t the only danger. There was Kasane.” Pain screwed Minister Ogyu’s right eye shut. “I couldn’t risk her telling. And after what my wife had done, I had to be the one to take the next step, didn’t I?” He seemed to be arguing with himself, not Reiko. “I had to do what a man, a samurai, would.”

He was using Bushido to justify cutting the throat of a helpless old woman who’d loved him. Reiko despised him, but her life depended on currying his favor while guiding him to a different conclusion than he had planned.

“You did right,” she said. “Everybody who knew about you is dead.” Also people who’d only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tears stung Reiko’s eyes as she thought of Lieutenant Tanuma and her other guards. “It’s time to stop the killing.”

Minister Ogyu glanced directly at her and whispered through gritted teeth. “There’s still one more person. You.”

“I don’t know anything that I can prove,” Reiko hurried to say. “It would be my word against yours. Nobody would believe me. Your guards didn’t.”

“You know I killed Kasane. You know I kidnapped you.” Facial spasms punctuated Minister Ogyu’s sentences. “You’ll tell your husband.”

“I’ll say you didn’t hurt me and I forgive you.” Reiko couldn’t keep her voice from stuttering with panic.

“Lord Hosokawa won’t forgive me or my wife for his daughters’ death.”

“Lord Hosokawa doesn’t matter,” Reiko said, even though he could start or prevent a civil war. “It’s my husband whose opinion counts. I’ll convince him to pardon you.”

Minister Ogyu raised his hand to dismiss her words, then massaged his temple. “Maybe he’ll excuse me for what I did to you. But not for what I did to him and his little girl.”

He was responsible for the bomb, Reiko realized. And he was right: Sano would never forgive someone who’d almost killed Akiko. Neither could she. Her anger toward Minister Ogyu grew into a wild, raging animal inside her, that wanted to claw out his throat.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” Minister Ogyu said. “It was an accident. I was waiting for Chamberlain Sano to come home. When I saw him, I was so intent on lighting the bomb and throwing it that I didn’t notice her until it left my hand.”