Sano emphasized these last words, then repeated, “A spring-bow trap.”
Amazement dumbfounded the troops; evidently the idea had never occurred to them. Hirata’s eyes filled with hope. They turned toward Chieftain Awetok, who listened as though he’d understood everything Sano had said and wasn’t surprised.
“You’re talking nonsense,” Gizaemon said.
“That can’t be!” Tekare exclaimed in outrage. “Lord Matsumae didn’t write that book!”
“Don’t take my word for it. Let’s ask him.” Sano called, “Lord Matsumae, are you there?”
Tekare stiffened as though a current of lightning had run through her. Her face went blank. A second, faint spot of fire ignited in each of her eyes.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Sano asked Lord Matsumae.
The man’s masculine cast and posture returned, but before he could answer, he shouted at himself in Tekare’s voice: “Is that book yours?”
He beheld the diary in Sano’s hand as if afraid that it would bite him. “… Yes.”
“Did you write those things?”
“Yes. No,” he stammered.
“Which is it?” Sano said, at the same time Tekare asked, “Did you hate me that much?”
“No! I was just confused, scribbling foolish notions. I loved you with all my heart.”
“You were planning to set a trap for me. Did you?”
Lord Matsumae’s gaze was full of fear directed inside himself. “I-I don’t know.”
“Of course he didn’t.” Gizaemon said to Sano, “After he’s been driven mad by grief over the woman, after he’s let you investigate her murder, how can you accuse him?”
“Grief isn’t the only thing that drives people mad. Guilt can, too. Sano had wondered if Lord Matsumae had sought to relieve it by punishing someone else for his crime.
Tekare leaned forward, menacing the man she possessed. The two spirits inside him created an illusion that his body had divided into two separate physical entities. “How can you not know? Did you or didn’t you kill me?”
Lord Matsumae backed away in a futile effort to escape her. “I mean, I don’t remember!”
“You deliberately forgot you killed Tekare because you didn’t want her to know.” This theory made as much sense to Sano as anything that happened in Ezogashima. “You were afraid of what she would do if she found out.”
Gizaemon spat out his toothpick in disgust at Sano. But rage suffused Tekare’s features that masked Lord Matsumae’s. “It was you!”
Lord Matsumae stumbled as he recoiled from the adversary within him. “It wasn’t, my beloved. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t-”
“Did you kill me?”
“No!” But Lord Matsumae’s denial weakened as his will eroded.
Sano urged, “Be an honorable samurai. Take responsibility for your actions. End this madness now.” If he couldn’t kill Lord Matsumae with his own hands, he would settle for coercing him to commit ritual suicide.
Lord Matsumae began slapping his own face. Tekare’s voice spewed invective. “You killed me! Murderer!”
His fists beat his chest, his stomach. As everyone else stared in shock, he fell and writhed while the spirit of Tekare screamed, “You’ll pay for my life with yours! Die!”
He closed his hands around his throat, strangled himself, and banged his head against the floor. His body bucked; his legs kicked. He gasped for air and choked.
“Stop him!” Gizaemon yelled at the troops as he ran to his nephew’s aid. “Before he kills himself!”
25
Reiko tiptoed down a passage in the women’s quarters and stopped outside a door that led to the section where the native concubines lived. Through it filtered their voices, conversing in their language. Reiko banged on the door, then shoved it open without waiting for an answer.
Their conversation halted. Reiko paused on the threshold of a chamber furnished with mats on the walls, thatched curtains over the windows, a table that held wooden spindles, and a loom partially filled with woven cloth. The concubines sat around a hearth, wooden bowls on their laps, spoons in their hands, eating a meal that smelled of dried fish and pungent seasonings. Mouths full, they gazed at Reiko. She was so blinded by anger that their tattooed faces looked identical; she couldn’t tell which belonged to the person she’d come to see.
“Wente!” she called.
One of them set down her food and rose. Wente’s shy smile faded as she perceived that Reiko hadn’t come in friendship.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you and Tekare were enemies? Reiko demanded.
Fright appeared on Wente’s face. She looked at her companions, seeking safety among them. Eyes averted from Reiko, she said, “How you know?”
“Lady Matsumae told me that you and Tekare used to fight. Your friends had to keep you apart.”
The other women clearly didn’t understand what she and Wente were saying but sensed danger in the air, for they scrambled to their feet and exited the room. Wente made a move to follow, but Reiko stepped in front of her. The two of them were alone in the smoky, firelit room that was like a native hut far from anyplace familiar or comfortable to Reiko.
“No have time,” Wente mumbled.
“There was plenty,” Reiko said, although she remembered that she’d been in a hurry to find Masahiro. Her mind veered away from the memory of hopes shattered, from grief. She buoyed herself up with the anger that had fixed on Wente. “It would have taken only a moment to tell me the truth about Tekare.”
Wente bit her lips. “You ask me about Lady Matsumae.”
“Forget Lady Matsumae.” That woman had blown a big hole in Reiko’s certainty that she was a killer. Reiko now acknowledged how rashly quick she’d been to trust Wente, to believe her grief for her sister was genuine and to sympathize with her. “You’re the one I’m interested in now. You had a quarrel with Tekare shortly before she died. What was it about?”
“Why you care?” Wente sounded timid yet resentful of Reiko’s prying. “Why you care who kill my sister?”
“Never mind that.” Anger at herself for her negligence doubled Reiko’s anger toward Wente. “Now why did you and Tekare quarrel?”
Wente’s resistance crumbled. Probably the habit of obeying the Japanese was too strong to break. She sighed, then said, “She ruin my life.”
Reiko felt the clear wind of truth sweep away the atmosphere of deception. “How?”
Extreme hatred came over Wente’s face, disfiguring it so much that Reiko barely recognized it. “When she come castle, she want me by her. I no want leave village. But she say I have to, even though-” She struggled to find Japanese words to explain. “Not concubine, no can live here. So Tekare find soldier want Ainu woman. He bring me.”
Now she was so eager to vent her grievance toward Tekare that she forgot Reiko was looking to pin the murder on her, neglected caution. “I no want him. But he take me.” Bitterness saturated her voice. “And she happy.”
Reiko absorbed the ugly meaning of this tale. Wente had been forced to become a concubine in order that Tekare could have her company at the castle. Tekare had paired Wente up with a Japanese man, regardless of Wente’s feelings. Wente had suffered doubly, from sexual enslavement and her sister’s cruel, selfish connivance in it.
“So you fought with her because of that?” Reiko asked.
Wente nodded, then shook her head: What Tekare had done was the root of the argument but not its topic. “I want go home. She no let me.”
Reiko perceived that she’d stumbled up against another situation beyond her limited understanding of Ezogashima. “But once you became a concubine, wasn’t it up to the man to say where you can go?” That was how the situation worked in Edo. “What authority did your sister have?”
“Soldier tired of me, say he send me back to village. But Tekare say she ask Lord Matsumae let me stay. He do anything she want him do for her.” The hatred exuded from Wente, foul as rot. “I beg her, but she no give in.”
Reiko wondered if Tekare’s side of the story had been different. “Maybe she was scared to be by herself at the castle. Maybe she was homesick and needed someone from her family, someone she loved, with her.”