The samurai exclaimed at the sight of this woman who’d evidently gone insane. Reiko, Midori, and Keisho-in gaped, amazed, at Lady Yanagisawa as she kept screaming and her body twitched in violent spasms. She’d managed a better diversion than Reiko had expected. The samurai didn’t notice Reiko because Lady Yanagisawa had all his attention. Reiko swung the rafter with all her might at the samurai. The wooden beam struck his temple-and snapped in two. The long, broken half thudded to the floor. The samurai grunted in surprise. He pivoted toward Reiko. His eyes aflame with pain and rage, he drew his sword.
Horror filled Reiko as she looked from him to the useless stub she held. Keisho-in and Midori shrieked. Lady Yanagisawa dropped to all fours, half naked, bleeding, and panting. Suddenly the samurai’s eyes rolled upward. He toppled unconscious to the floor.
The peasant youth who’d brought the food yesterday rushed into the room, shouting, “What happened?” He carried a pail, which he set on the floor as he bent over his comrade.
Reiko tossed aside the stub, lunged, and shoved the youth. With a cry of surprise, he stumbled headlong across the room. He crashed against the wall. As he regained his balance and turned, Reiko lifted his pail that contained what looked to be soup. She hurled the pail at him.
It struck him in the stomach. Broth, seaweed, and tofu splattered the room. The youth gawked at the women. Across his childish, naive face flashed his dismay that the prisoners had rebelled and there was no one but him to restore order. Then awareness of his duty braced him. He let out a yell and charged at Reiko, hands extended to snatch.
She picked up the long end of the rafter and swatted his forehead. He fell, with a thud that shook the room, and lay unmoving.
In the sudden quiet, the women stared at their vanquished foes, then at each other. Wordlessly they shared their disbelief at the success of Reiko’s plan. That the whole battle had lasted just an instant amazed Reiko.
She bent, light-headed, from delayed excitation. Her heart banged wildly in her chest, but she couldn’t spare any time to recuperate. “Help me tie the men up,” she told Lady Yanagisawa.
Quickly they rolled over the samurai, removed his sash, and used the long cotton cloth to truss his ankles and wrists behind him; then they did the same to the peasant youth.
“Why not just kill them?” Lady Keisho-in said. “The way they’ve treated us, they deserve to die.”
“We don’t want their comrades to take revenge on you.” Reiko pulled off the men’s sandals and jammed their socks in their mouths so that when they woke, they couldn’t call to their comrades. She snatched up the samurai’s fallen sword and thrust it into Lady Yan-agisawa’s hands. “Use this to defend yourself and Midori and Lady Keisho-in if necessary.”
Lady Yanagisawa held the weapon as though afraid of cutting herself. “… But I don’t know how.”
There was no time for Reiko to teach her sword fighting. “Do the best you can,” Reiko said. She yanked the samurai’s dagger from the scabbard at his waist, then hurried to the door. “I must go now.”
“Good luck,” Midori said. “And please be careful!”
“Bring back the army,” Keisho-in commanded.
Lady Yanagisawa sat in her disheveled garments, the sword wavering in her grip, her expression forlorn.
Hating to leave her friends so helpless, Reiko slipped out the door. She found herself in an empty room whose barred windows gave a view of leafy branches. Walls of thick beams embedded in plaster, blackened by fire, enclosed this room and divided it from the prison. In its center, a wooden staircase slanted upward to a square hole in the ceiling. Daylight poured through the hole. The foot of the staircase ended at another opening in the floor. Clutching her stolen dagger, Reiko hastened to peer down the hole and saw more stairs zigzagging through the building’s lower levels. She paused, listening. She heard only the sounds of birds, water, and wind. Then she plunged down the stairs.
Loose, uneven slats wobbled under her sandals. She leapt over spaces where risers were missing. The smells of old smoke and rotted wood intensified. She passed through a room similar to that above. As she clambered down the next flight of stairs, the need for caution vied with her urge to hurry. She slowed her pace near the end of the staircase and hesitantly entered the bottom level.
This contained a room that must have once been an armory; hooks and racks for hanging weapons protruded from the walls. On the stone floor lay a rusted cannon. Double doors, made of heavy timbers and iron plates, beckoned Reiko. One door stood opened outward, framing a rectangle of daylight. Reiko ran to the door and peeked outside. A narrow landing preceded a short flight of stone steps that led to paved, empty ground. Beyond this, a forest of pines, cypress, and maple obscured the distance. To her right and left rose more trees that grew close beside the building. Reiko savored the prospect of freedom. She hurried down the steps into cool, humid fresh air and across the cracked paving stones. A gap in the forest marked the path along which the kidnappers must have brought her and the other women. There Reiko paused, looked backward to see if anyone was coming, and got her first glimpse of her prison.
It was a tall, square tower. Many of the flat rocks that banked its sloped foundation had dropped away, exposing the clay understructure. The tower’s walls were plaster, once white but now discolored black and gray by fire and crumbling off the wood framework. Upturned eaves shaded the three lower stories and their barred windows. On the fourth, highest story, a crumbling segment of wall and the remains of a tile roof enclosed one corner. The room stood open to the sky, where dark storm clouds drifted over the sun. Fallen wreckage surrounded the tower. Reiko realized that her prison was the keep of a castle, probably ruined in the civil wars during the last century. But she had no idea where in the world the castle was located.
She crept down the path, over weeds flattened by footsteps. A breeze enlivened the forest; sun-dappled shadows whispered. Unaccustomed to the wild, Reiko flinched at noises. Was that an animal’s cry, or a human voice? A bird pecking a hollow tree, or someone drumming a signal? Reiko tiptoed, holding her dagger ready to stab, should anyone leap out of the forest at her. She regretted that her kimono, with its pattern of lavender irises on aqua silk, rendered her conspicuous.
She’d traversed some thirty paces into the forest when the path divided. Looking down the right-hand branch, beyond a cypress grove, Reiko saw the peaks and gables of tile roofs that belonged to the castle’s other buildings. There the kidnappers must have their headquarters. Reiko hurried down the left path. It circled back around the keep, whose ruined top she could see above the trees. Then the path and forest ended.
Before her, a narrow strip of sloping ground, covered with tall grass, separated the forest from the water she’d heard while imprisoned. The water, rimmed with reeds, sparkling blue and indigo beneath the scudding clouds, appeared to be a lake that stretched some two hundred paces to the opposite shore, where woods rose into hills. The wind rippled little waves across the lake’s surface. Looking right, Reiko saw that the shoreline at her feet gave way to marsh as it curved into the distance. To her near left, the ground had eroded, and the keep jutted into the lake; waves smacked the stone base. Reiko was alarmed. She couldn’t cross the lake to safety because she didn’t know how to swim-females of her class weren’t taught during childhood, as were daughters of fishermen. Nor could she follow the lakeshore in the hope of finding a village, because she couldn’t get around the keep or through the marsh. She’d chosen the wrong direction and wasted precious time.
Reiko darted back into the forest, heading west and inland, climbing over fallen logs, wading through underbrush, and ducking under low branches, until she stumbled upon a path. This led her dangerously near the castle, within twenty paces of a burned building that had collapsed. Reiko saw smoke rising above the roofs of adjacent, intact structures. She smelled fish roasting over a charcoal fire. Her stomach growled with hunger, for she’d eaten nothing since the kidnappers had brought the food yesterday. She raced on, afraid of encountering the men, past crumbled walls and more trees, seeking a road to any place she could find friendly people. Soon she burst free of the woods-and foundered on another grassy slope that inclined toward more water.