“Why aren’t they putting it out?” Masahiro asked, only his eyes visible between the visor and face shield of his leather hood.
Sano and Marume pushed their way through the crowd. “What’s wrong?” Sano shouted over the noise of the clanging bell.
“The well is plugged,” someone said. “There’s no water.”
“Damn it to hell!” Marume said.
Sano ran to the residence and accosted a fireman. “Did Yoshisato get out?” he asked.
“We haven’t seen him. The house was in full blaze when we got here. He must still be inside.”
Sano’s heart sank. It didn’t matter that Yoshisato was a fraud and the son of his enemy. Yoshisato was a human being whose life was in danger. Lowering his visor over his eyes, pulling on leather gloves from the pocket of his cape, Sano ran to the entrance. Fireman armed with hooked poles had pulled off the door. They shouted, “Don’t go in there!”
Beyond the doorway, flames licked the corridor. Pillars toppled; walls caved in. Smoke and heat blasted Sano. He leaped backward. Desperate to save Yoshisato, he ran back to the well to see if he could help unplug it. Four firemen bent over the circular, stone-rimmed hole in the ground. A head emerged from the well. The fireman pulled their comrade up. He came out hauling a large, drenched white quilt. “This was down there.”
Someone had deliberately plugged the well. Sano had no time to wonder who or why. Men quickly formed lines between the well and the residence. Sano, Marume, and Masahiro took their places. Filled buckets passed from hands to hands. The men at the front of the lines flung water on the burning building. The water sizzled in the flames. Steam hissed in smoke. Empty buckets moved back down the line and full ones moved up in an endless cycle. Marume looked as if he could work forever, but Sano was sweating under his leather garments. His arms began to ache. He and Masahiro had to step out of the line; others took their places. The inferno raged on. The roof collapsed with a mighty crash and a fountain of embers. Firemen began pulling the structure down, hacking it apart. The bell stopped clanging as the flames died.
Sano’s ears rang in the sudden quiet. Everyone stood still, exhausted and speechless, gazing at the ruins. Wisps of steamy smoke rose from piles of blackened timbers. Cinders still glimmered. The grounds were awash in soot-blackened puddles, the air acrid with smoke.
The fire brigade captain and his assistants waded into the ruins to look for survivors. Marume muttered, “There can’t be anyone alive in there.”
Although Sano thought the same, he joined the search. Tossing aside beams, planks, and tiles that were still hot, he found the first body. It was burned black. The bones showed through scraps of flesh. In the abdominal cavity, organs had cooked into a foul mass. Eye sockets gaped in the skull; teeth were exposed in a horrible grin. A wave of nausea assailed Sano. He sucked air under the face shield of his mask. He gagged on the smell of charred meat.
Firemen called out as they found other bodies. There were four total. The captain said, “Yoshisato lived here with three bodyguards. This is everybody.”
Silence descended on the compound. The wind keened, blowing ash on the rescuers, who bowed their heads in despair. Sano thought of Yoshisato at the martial arts tournament, so alive and agile and idealistic. He wouldn’t have to decide whether to accept Yoshisato’s proposition. Yoshisato would never build the coalition he’d described.
Sano’s wish had been granted in dreadful fashion. Yoshisato wasn’t going to be shogun.
Although glad that the regime was safe from fraud, Sano was also horrified. He would rather have Yoshisato be shogun than die so terribly. He grieved for the youth he’d liked and respected in spite of himself. He wished with all his might that events had taken a different turn.
Where was Yanagisawa?
At this moment Sano couldn’t be glad that Yanagisawa had just lost his hold on the regime. A father himself, he couldn’t rejoice in another father’s losing a child, no matter that Yanagisawa was his enemy or that Yanagisawa had given his son over to the shogun.
The firemen stood talking amid the ruins. “Why didn’t the night guard notice the fire and get everybody out?” “How did it burn the house so fast?” “Did somebody just happen to throw a quilt down the well tonight?”
An awful suspicion sent Sano running to the firemen. Marume and Masahiro joined him. Sano said, “Do you think the fire wasn’t an accident?”
The captain said somberly, “It looks like arson.”
Sano, Marume, and Masahiro exchanged alarmed glances. If it was arson, Yoshisato’s death was murder. The repercussions would be enormous.
Sano looked around. The men in the crowd had removed their hoods. Their sweaty faces were visible in the light of dawn. Sano recognized army officers and castle functionaries; no one outranked him. The higher officials had probably stayed away from the fire because they didn’t want to risk their lives or be held responsible if Yoshisato died. Sano was in charge.
“Before you tell the shogun the fire was arson, we need evidence,” he told the captains. “You look for witnesses. I’ll search the area.”
The captain headed toward the crowd. Sano began exploring the grounds with Marume and Masahiro. “What are we looking for?” Masahiro asked
“Anything that doesn’t belong,” Marume said.
Sano searched the singed bushes near the ruins. From under the third bush he pulled out a metal basket, the kind used to hold coals for lighting tobacco pipes. The basket was empty, the inside coated with ash. Sano also retrieved an empty brown ceramic jar and a bundle of rags. He sniffed them. They smelled of kerosene.
He’d often been ecstatic to find clues during murder investigations. Now he couldn’t have been more disturbed as he gathered up the basket, jar, and rags to show the fire brigade captain.
“Yoshisato! Where is he?” Yanagisawa shouted, barreling through the gate with a squadron of troops. His lavishly patterned silk robes were a colorful, glaring contrast to the bleak scene. When he saw the burned wreckage, he stumbled to a halt. Terror blanched his face. “What happened?”
* * *
No one answered. Yanagisawa saw men in fire capes staring at him. Their features were carved in lines of exhaustion and despair. Yanagisawa roamed through the crowd, searching.
“Yoshisato! Yoshisato!” he cried with increasing urgency.
Only the echo of his own voice replied. He read the terrible news in the other men’s eyes. He staggered toward the ruins, his high-soled sandals slipping in puddles. Grief began to rise in his spirit, like a tidal wave forming under water when a volcano explodes the ocean floor. He clambered among charred boards that tore at his robes. The night was eerily quiet. The wind had died down. The crowd watched him in silence. He almost stepped on the first corpse.
He screamed as he reeled away from the grinning, broken skeleton covered with blackened flesh. Crawling over broken tiles that cut his hands and knees, he found three more burned, curled-up bodies. None were recognizable. None even looked human. Yanagisawa desperately resisted believing that one was Yoshisato, but his mind did the dire calculation. Four corpses. Yoshisato and his bodyguards. They were all accounted for. Yoshisato was dead.
A dizzying, crushing sensation came over Yanagisawa as he knelt amid the wreckage. Fifteen months ago, Yoritomo had died a violent death. Tonight so had Yoshisato. Yanagisawa had already lost one son. Now he’d lost another, his better chance at complete domination over the regime. His hope of ruling Japan through Yoshisato had gone up in the smoke he’d seen while riding back to Edo Castle. But the demise of that hope seemed trivial. The anguish that flooded him was all for Yoshisato.
His insolent, contrary, tough-minded son!
His son that he loved despite Yoshisato’s efforts to punish and alienate him, despite his knowledge that love made him vulnerable.
Yanagisawa hadn’t thought that anything could hurt as much as Yoritomo’s death, which had dropped him into an abyss of mourning. But Yoshisato’s death was the greater tragedy. The sweet, obedient, devoted Yoritomo was nothing compared to Yoshisato. Yoshisato was special. He could have been a great man someday. Wracked by grief, Yanagisawa wept.