An idea came to him. With these three men out chasing him, the house was less heavily guarded. And they would expect him to run away from it, not toward it. He could pass under the buildings and head for the wall on the far side of the gate.
Sano began a slow advance on the house. He felt each step of the way with his hands and feet so he wouldn’t make any noise. Finally he reached the edge of the clearing. Lying there, he scanned the house.
The front-door guard remained at his post, gazing after his companions. Another guard was patrolling the side of the villa. Sano watched the man complete two rounds of inspection to learn the pattern. Walk to front of house, pause, look around. Turn. Walk along side of house, all the way past covered corridor to pavilion, while scrutinizing woods. Turn, repeat. Sano waited until the guard had almost reached the turnaround point at the pavilion. Then he hurried across the open space in a crouching run and dived under the house.
He traversed the side house and its covered corridor. He’d reached the shinden when he heard muffled voices and creaking wood overhead. Lord Niu and his guests. Crawling to the shinden‘s rear corner, Sano poked his head out from under the house. He saw no one on the back veranda or in the garden. Those guards must be the ones now searching the woods for him. He eased the rest of his body free. The voices grew louder, carrying through the flimsy paper panes between the lattice bars. The men sounded agitated, all talking at once, their words unintelligible. Tense in anticipation of more flying arrows, Sano knew he should go before the guards came. He reminded himself that he had the sandal and the rope and O-hisa’s testimony. What more could he expect?
Instead of running, Sano drew his dagger. He’d come too far and risked too much to leave without learning all he could. Emboldened by the noise in the house, he cut a hole in the window. Cautiously he put his eye to it.
Oil lamps and charcoal braziers filled the vast room with an eerie, flickering light and a smoky haze. In the center, twenty young men sat in a semicircle, arguing, oblivious to anything outside. Sano recognized some of them as men Lord Niu had met at the swordmaker’s shop and the martial arts academy. So Lord Niu’s movements hadn’t been as aimless as they’d seemed. He’d arranged the “chance” encounters to summon the men to this meeting. Now they faced him as he knelt upon a platform, a painted screen at his back. An uneasy quiet, punctuated by throat clearings, fell over the group, as if they feared his response.
Although the remains of a meal lay on trays scattered among the men, Sano found the scene more suggestive of a haphazard picnic than of a banquet. Their serious expressions and the almost palpable tension in the room told him this was no ordinary social occasion. Also, the men were armed, as they normally wouldn’t be in a private house. Sano pursed his lips in surprise when he recognized the crests on their kimonos: those of the Maeda, Date, and Hosokawa families among them. Lord Niu had assembled representatives from every major daimyo clan except for the Tokugawas.
The Maeda man spoke. “I think the plan is too risky,” he said. “It won’t work. I propose we reconsider the alternatives.”
Immediately the others joined their voices again in furious dissent.
“He’s right!”
“No! It will work!”
“There’s no time to lose, we have to act!”
“I don’t like it, either.”
“That’s enough.” Lord Niu, who had watched with a thin smile as his companions argued, now silenced them with one peremptory command.
They turned to him, faces reflecting various degrees of fear, respect, and admiration. Sano could understand how Lord Niu inspired such emotions. The daimyo’s son fairly shimmered with a passion that lit his eyes and made his small body seem larger. Even his skin, flushed perhaps by his recent sexual release, suggested an inner fire that drew the men to its warmth. For what scheme had he recruited them? Sano wondered whether it had any bearing on the murders, or if he was risking his life needlessly by eavesdropping.
“There will be no more discussion of the plan,” Lord Niu said, disappointing Sano. He stood, a slight jerkiness of movement the only sign of his deformity. “But in case you have forgotten, let me remind you why our action is necessary, and what we stand to gain from it.”
His voice rose in both pitch and volume; he dominated the room, holding the other men motionless as he paced the platform. “Are we not sick unto death of the repression and humiliation that our oppressors have perpetrated upon us? Have our fathers and grandfathers not been stripped of their ancestral fiefs and moved to lesser ones at the ends of the earth? Have they not suffered the indignities of alternate attendance in Edo and imprisonment on their estates? Are they not unable to come and go freely?”
An angry rumble passed through the men. Backs straightened; fists clenched.
“Must we continue to let the Tokugawas drain our wealth away by forcing us to subsidize the maintenance of their castles, their roads, their waterworks?” Lord Niu shouted, eyes blazing. “Why should we finance the government while the shogun wastes his own money on his harem of boy actors and peasants? Why should we let him dictate how we should furnish our homes, and even how we should dress? Should we endure his spying upon us? Or the abominable harassment by his inspectors when we travel on the Tōkaido?”
The rumble became a roar. “We won’t stand for it any longer!” someone shouted. Other men took up the cry, quieting only when Lord Niu raised his voice over theirs.
“Tokugawa Tsunayoshi is a weak fool who lets his army and his chamberlain, the despicable Yanagisawa, run the government while he sports with the wives and daughters of his ministers. And with his enforced peace, he would drag us down to his own level of moral depravity. Do we let him deprive us of our rightful occupation-that of serving our honor by making war?”
“No! No! Down with the Tokugawas!”
Sano had to choke back a gasp of surprise. He found himself trembling with excitement. The meeting’s isolated setting, the secretive arrival of the participants, and Lord Niu’s incendiary speech could mean only one thing. The risky plan constituted a plot against the Tokugawa government. Treason. For which Lord Niu, if caught, would be executed and disgraced more certainly than if convicted for the murder of a samurai child. And for which his family would share his punishment. Now Sano wondered whether Yukiko had died not because she’d witnessed the murder, but because she’d discovered the plot. And what about Noriyoshi? Had he learned of it too?
“Do we let Tsunayoshi rob us of our samurai heritage and values as well, by turning us into simpering bureaucrats who protect dogs, or vulgar oafs who brawl in the streets for want of anything better to do?” Lord Niu asked.
“No!” all twenty voices shouted in unison.
“Then we must act without delay. We must fight as we were born to do. We will restore to our names the honor and glory that has been denied them for too long!”
Now that he’d recovered from his initial shock, Sano sensed an underlying false note in Lord Niu’s performance. His pacing, his hand gestures, and the anger in his voice and expression seemed overly theatrical. Lord Niu was playing to his audience as an actor would, exploiting their legitimate anger toward the Tokugawas. Did he really care about the shogun’s mistreatment of his or the other daimyo clans?
But the men responded with great enthusiasm to his theatrics. “Yes! Yes!” The floor shuddered as they leaped to their feet. Metal rasped as they unsheathed their swords and held them high.