I. Parker: Black Arrow

Akitada sighed. “My friend,” he said, “and I hope I may still call you that-I have made many mistakes since I arrived. Perhaps some of my mistakes have cost lives and will cost more. Not the least of my mistakes was to doubt you. I should have known that a man who would risk his life to perform an illegal exhumation at my request would not at the same time plot against me.” He bowed to Oyoshi. “I apologize humbly for my foolishness.”

The doctor became so agitated that he spilled his tea. “Oh, no,” he cried. “Please don’t. You were quite right to suspect everyone, and who more than myself? What could you know about me, who had hidden his past from everyone? What should you think when I gave the wrong testimony in court? Why should you trust me when I was so conveniently on the premises when Mrs. Omeya was killed? You did quite right and have behaved with the greatest justice and patience towards me.”

“You will stay then?”

Oyoshi did not answer right away. He put down his teacup and wiped his fingers. “There is another thing. I killed someone,” he said softly. “I had a very bad moment when Tora said something about murderous doctors and looked at me in a very knowing way. May I tell you about it?”

Akitada said quickly, “There is no need. I am quite satisfied.”

“Allow me, sir. Many years ago, in another province, I served as personal physician to … a powerful man. I caused my patient’s death after I discovered that my wife had spent more time in his bed than in mine. It was wrong to love her more than my duty.” He broke off and raised a hand to hide his face in shame.

“You were not found out?”

Oyoshi lowered his hand and smiled bleakly. “No. He was ill and I attended him. Once I was a very good physician. I could have saved his life, but I let him die. Afterwards I divorced my wife and left the area. I spent the next ten years traveling, working at fairs and treating the poor, earning a few coppers as a barber now and then to buy medicines. For another fifteen years after that I tried the religious life. I entered a monastery, but in the end the guilt would not leave me and it grated on my ears to be called a holy man. So I took to the road again and ended up here, where I hoped to end my life in obscurity.” He gave a hollow laugh and shook his head.

Akitada was relieved. “Legally you are not guilty of murder,” he said. “This will not prevent you from serving as coroner.”

“I must confess to yet another offense,” Oyoshi said sadly. “When I saw you at Takata, ill, outnumbered, outmanipulated, and surrounded by forces you seemed neither by background nor by personality equipped to handle, you seemed lost. Then, when you asked me to serve as your coroner, I formed the somewhat confused idea of throwing in my lot with you. Circumstances favored this, and the more I learned about you, the more convinced I became that joining your downfall would be my personal atonement. I planned to end my life with you and thus make amends for my past. But I was quite wrong. You have fought the evil in this province successfully and you will prevail, while I must continue to bear my guilt.”

For a moment Akitada was so taken aback by this that he did not know whether to laugh or be angry. Then he remembered the coming battle and said, “I suppose both my arrogance and my ignorance, obvious to everyone but me, blinded me to the local problems in the beginning. You were not wrong about me. I have little to be proud of, and had I known how badly I would bungle, I would have fled in panic. Let us hope that some good may still come of our most foolish actions. I want you to stay.”

Oyoshi brushed at his eyes. “If you truly wish it, sir,” he murmured. He rose awkwardly and stumbled from the room.

Heavy gray clouds swirled above and sleet stung their faces. Below them, the forest enclosing the frozen fields looked funereal, like a black stole draped across a pallid hempen gown. It was past midday. Hours ago, Akitada and Takesuke had ridden up to the Takata gate and demanded Makio’s surrender. A hail of arrows had been their answer. After that, Takesuke had withdrawn his troops, and Akitada, along with Hitomaro and Tora, had gone to meet Kaoru.

The four would make the dangerous attempt to get inside the fortified manor. They wore straw rain capes over light armor and waited hidden among trees where they could see part of the road leading up to the manor. A quarter of the hour passed before the old woman appeared, walking slowly and leaning on the arm of a girl.

“Isn’t that your sister?” Hitomaro asked Kaoru. “Why risk her life?”

“My cousin. She usually goes along and I could not stop her.”

They waited again, nervously now, until the two women returned. The girl loosened the shawl around her head and let it blow in the wind for a moment before she retied it.

“Good girl! All is ready,” said Kaoru, adding grimly, “Let’s hope we do our part as well.”

Akitada looked up at the sky to gauge the time. There was no sun. The icy wind pushed angry gray clouds before it, clouds so low that they hid the snowy tops of the distant mountains. Wisps of cloud drifted across the dark roofs of Takata manor- shredded silk gauze from a mourner’s train.

They left the trees at a run and dashed across the road. Up the hill, still at a run, they kept mostly to a gully, a jagged scar which ran up the barren hillside. The gully gave them some cover, but then they were in the open again and close enough to the manor that a single archer on one of the galleries could pick them off one by one, like running deer.

As they ran uphill, the low clouds finally released the first heavy drops. They congealed into sleet in the cold wind and stung their faces. Akitada clasped his heavy sword to his side so it would not get between his legs and trip him. His armor was also heavy and cumbersome, and the rain-soaked straw cape flapped wetly against him. His breath soon came in hoarse gasps, his chest hurt, and his leg muscles ached, but he was ashamed to fall back behind the others. When they reached the steep outcropping under the eastern wall, he sagged against the rock, drenched in sweat despite the bitter cold.

They huddled there for a little, in a blind spot where an overhanging gallery hid them from watching eyes above, and waited for the signal. The icy wind cut through the straw coats and turned the metal scales of their armor into ice against their wet bodies. Akitada’s teeth chattered from cold and nerves.

Below the land stretched away, empty sere fields traversed by the darker line of the road. They had come from the forest to the north and followed a path so narrow and overgrown that only Kaoru had known how to find it. He had kept an eye on the ramparts above them, but they had seen no watchers. Takesuke and his men were on the other side, below the approach to the manor’s gate, and that was where Uesugi expected the attack to come from.

Here immense slabs of rock rose to an outer wall and to the black timbers of a gallery jutting into the stormy gray sky above them. Dry shrubs and stunted trees grew from cracks in the rocks. Kaoru moved along the path to one of the slabs of rock and felt it. He grunted and gave a push, and Akitada saw a crack widen into a thin black fissure.

Like the tomb entrance, Akitada thought with a shiver. He said aloud, “What about the signal?”

Kaoru nodded. “We wait a little longer, but there isn’t much time left.”

So they stood, shivering in the sleeting rain with their sword grips freezing to their perspiring palms, wondering if Koreburo had been caught. Akitada heard distant drumbeats carried on the wind in snatches. Takesuke was following instructions and exercising his troops. Akitada wished himself a common foot soldier, trotting briskly and unencumbered by heavy armor to the command of an officer. He was impatient to get this over with, to confront what lay in wait behind the stone door. Action, any kind of action, was preferable to this agonizing process of congealing in the freezing blasts.