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[Continuing chapter 3]
Shiro arrived at the mansion kitchen just as Hiroki was completing his cleansing and bandaging of Tetsuo’s wound.
“He got you, did he?” Shiro asked, dropping to the floor and wiping his brow. “Must have been a lucky shot. Nothing else he fired at us came close. Well, except for that one arrow that I smacked right out of the air. Did you see that, Tetsuo?”
“I was busy at the time.”
“I’ll have to do it again for you.” Shiro pulled off his socks, wriggling his toes, then shifted closer to the central fire.
“Not that I want to interrupt this discussion of your many excellences,” Hiroki said, beginning to put away his healing herbs, “but did you by any chance catch up with the man?”
“No, I did not.” Shiro’s face turned sulky. “You’d think he would have been interested in a fair fight, but he was a coward. As soon as he saw me coming toward him he jumped over the outside of the wall. He didn’t even take another shot at me.”
“Perhaps you weren’t his intended victim.”
“But he had a bow, Hiroki, which means he must have been a warrior. We don’t turn down opportunities to fight. What was wrong with the man?”
One day perhaps you’ll learn that sometimes we do turn down opportunities to fight, Hiroki told him silently. We don’t all view our lives as something to throw away. “As I said, perhaps he had a goal that did not involve fighting with you. Where did he go?”
“By the time I got up and over the wall — and these walls are in terrible shape, Hiroki, just the flimsiest things — he was running like a rabbit for the western hills. I chased him for a while, because as skinny as he looked I figured it ought to be easy for me to catch him. But he really was like a rabbit. Or perhaps a fox. Could he have been a fox-spirit, do you suppose?”
“He could have been, though I’m not sure why a fox-spirit would want to assassinate the representative of a provincial lord visiting the capital. My understanding has always been that fox-spirits like to take possession of young women — or young men,” Hiroki said, with a telling look at Shiro — “who display a weakness when it comes to matters of the opposite sex.”
“I resent that,” Shiro said. “I will continue to resent it until somebody gives me a cup of warm sake.”
Hiroki nodded to the girl tending the fire, who brought out the sake and cups and began warming a bottle. “No, I believe our assailant will have a more earthly origin to him, Shiro. You said he was thin?”
“Like your staff. How he had the strength to pull a bow I don’t understand.”
“A rōnin, then.” A master-less warrior, either by choice or by virtue of his lord’s death. Usually the latter. “And likely someone who has been on short rations for some time. Which doesn’t really tell us much, I’m afraid. A master-less warrior would be prepared to hire himself out to anyone, and for any task.”
“Especially if he thought he might be taken on as a vassal,” Tetsuo said, pouring sake into a cup and handing it to Shiro with his left hand.
“A good point,” Hiroki said. “So let us assume that a clan of some power decides that our mission here poses a threat. The quickest way to defuse that threat is to kill one or both of the men in charge of the mission. And the safest way of doing that is to hire somebody who is willing to kill at a distance. Somebody who won’t ask questions and will do what he’s told in the hope that he will be rewarded with a position and a salary.”
“This makes sense,” Tetsuo said. “But it doesn’t really tell us very much, does it? Because we don’t know yet if any of the clans who oppose Lord Tanuma have representatives in the capital. And we don’t know if any of the clans in the capital have any reason for disliking Lord Tanuma.”
“I don’t like having to say it, Tetsuo, but I am coming to believe that your being wounded this evening has been a minor blessing for us.”
“Always glad to help out, Hiroki. But what do you mean?”
“Our lords now have extra incentive to charge us with investigating conditions in the capital. Not only will this keep us from being penned up in the Miyoshi mansion for the next several days, it will give us the excuse we need to go over every block of the city if we have to, in order to find the man who attacked us.
“And the people who hired him.”
Next Characters Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
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