Chapter 10: Under the blossoming cherry trees – Part 4

Shigemaru had already lost interest in the evening's report by the time Mifune delivered it.

He was in his inner room, a merchant's house repurposed with the tastelessness of a man who'd always wanted luxury and had no idea what to do with it once he had it, occupying himself with one of his wives, whose opinions on the matter were not being sought. He waved a hand when Mifune entered, not bothering to fully disentangle himself from her.

"Well?"            

"He fights like the Wind of Kai," Mifune said, giving no indication that he noticed or cared what he'd walked into. "Takeda work, and not the half-remembered kind—the real thing. He was never once where the blade came down. Seven men couldn't touch him." A pause. "Better than anyone still living by those methods has any right to be. Better than anyone living, full stop."

Shigemaru grunted, not yet interested enough to look up.

"And he has a horse," Mifune went on. "Black. Full gallop through old-growth cedar at night without touching a single tree." He considered the next part carefully. "Swift as wind, silent as forest. It looked like something off a Takeda battle banner—like the banner had decided to become a horse. Like something that shouldn't be an actual animal."

Shigemaru was still for a moment, his previous occupation forgotten, at least temporarily.

"You're telling me it's actually a Takeda dog," he said. It was not quite a question.

"I'm telling you I put a shuriken in him—a clean nick, and enough poison on it to drop an ox—and he was gone before it had time to work. It's the only mark anyone laid on him all night, and it closed over while I watched." Mifune let that sit.

Shigemaru sat with that, the calculation moving visibly across his face, interest replacing his earlier distraction.

Mifune stood where he always stood and thought about Nagashima.

That was eight years ago now. Third summer of the siege. The delta was flooded and there was no rice anywhere in it, and his unit had been starving for a month. Nineteen men. Shigemaru had been their quartermaster, and he moved between the siege lines more freely than a man in that job needed to.

Mifune had been sent for water. He walked out with two buckets and came back at dusk, and by then Shigemaru had sold the position for rice and gold, and the nineteen were dead in the mud. None of them had managed to stand up first.

Shigemaru walked out of the delta clean and went into Akechi Mitsuhide's service. Mifune spent eight years looking for him. When he finally found him, in a province that had fallen apart, he presented himself as a competent man looking for work. Shigemaru looked at him for about three seconds and hired him.

That was the part Mifune couldn't get past. Three seconds. Shigemaru had sold so many people that none of the faces stayed with him, and so the last man alive from the delta could stand in his firelight every night for two years and be useful.

He was going to kill him. He had known it for eight years.

Not yet. Shigemaru had forty men and a chief's authority, and a knife in the ribs tonight would only make him a murdered bandit. Mifune needed him to understand, at the end, what he was paying for and who he was paying. That took arranging. The delta had taught him that skill decides nothing and arrangement decides everything, and he had been arranging a long time.

Now there was a swordsman in the cedars who couldn't be touched.

Mifune hadn't planned for someone else wanting the same thing.

Shigemaru looked at his wife, and the interest shifted, the Takeda ghost filed away for whatever it was worth.

"Stay," he said to her. Then, to Mifune, without looking up: "You did well. Help yourself to this. We'll discuss the ghost in the morning."

Mifune looked at the woman. Her face had emptied out. He had seen that in the delta, on men who knew what was coming.