Sowing Ghosts 7.4

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[Concluding chapter 7]

“I brought you a book,” Hiroki said, handing the scroll to Katsumi. “I was hoping to spend some time discussing it with you, but I have more duties tonight and so cannot stay. Our renga lesson likewise must remain a thing of the future.”

“I will always have time to talk poetry with you,” Katsumi said, smiling broadly as she took the book and stroked the fingers of one hand along the wooden case. “Tomorrow, perhaps.” The night was comparatively mild for the second month, and so the tea-shop was largely empty, allowing Hiroki to hold his interview with Katsumi at a table rather than on the floor in her partition at the back.

“Tomorrow would be good,” Hiroki told her, anticipating being free of his responsibilities to Lord Miyoshi. “In the meantime, I would be most pleased to hear of what you have learned for me.”

Her reply astonished him. “I will tell you some of what I know,” she said, “in exchange for a promise from you.”


“I was unaware,” he said, keeping all emotion from his voice, “that we had the sort of relationship that allowed for this sort of bargaining on your part.”

She glared up at him and placed her hands on the table, as if preparing to push herself — and the bench she sat on — away. “I am not bargaining with you, lord.” Her voice was as cold as her words were formal. “I have made promises that I intend to keep, and I will tell you nothing that might prevent me from keeping those promises. Or did you think that only samurai have honour?”

For a moment he could think of nothing to say. He did, in fact, believe something very much like that, he realized, and this put him in a most uncomfortable position. His rank meant he could quite easily have her tortured into telling him whatever he wanted to know. But he had spent the past two decades trying to make himself into something more than his mother’s son. Was this woman sent by the gods, perhaps, to test his resolution on the change he had tried to make in his life?

“I would not wish you to break a promise,” he said, aware of how stiff and formal he sounded. “I would, though, wish you to remember that my friend was wounded in that attack and my superiors could easily have been killed. You must agree that I would be justified in anything I did that led to the discovery of the truth in this matter.”

“You can discover the truth after you have made your promise, and you can even act on that truth without breaking your promise.”

“You can say this without telling me what it is I am to promise?”

She smiled and some of the tension went out of her face and the set of her shoulders. “I think I know you a little, now,” she said, “and that little is enough for me to trust you. All I ask is that you promise not to harm the man I will introduce you to. He is not the one responsible for the attack on you, but he could very well be the one who helps you find the responsible person.”

“If he is able to help me to find the attacker, why would I want to harm him?”

“I said he would help you find the person responsible for the attack,” Katsumi said. “May I have your promise not to harm him?”

Hiroki was about to promise when he realized what she had really been saying. “You are asking me to promise I will not harm the man who wounded my friend, because he can help me find the person who ordered the attack?”

“Is that such a bad thing to ask? Think about the nature of the attack, Lord Hiroki. Would any man attack you from a distance who had a real reason for wanting your superiors dead or injured?”

Of course he would, Hiroki said to himself. Warriors are nowhere nearly as honourable as we like to pretend we are. He couldn’t say this aloud, though. “You are suggesting that a man who felt he had a legitimate reason for assassinating us would have been honourable enough to challenge us first.”

“Well, yes. Wouldn’t he?”

“But you are also asking me to accept that while your friend would not have attacked us in such a cowardly fashion if someone else hadn’t ordered him to do this, there is still a person of authority who is so cowardly as to attack us without a proper challenge.”

For a moment she looked flustered. Then she seized on something irrelevant: “I didn’t say that the man was my friend.”

“You wouldn’t be going through this performance for someone you didn’t know,” Hiroki told her. Before she could protest he added, “I don’t care. I think I know you a little now, too, Katsumi, and for now I am prepared to accept what you say. I promise you I will not harm this man when you take me to him.”

As she smiled and once again picked up the book he’d brought her, Hiroki added, to himself, But I do not promise that no harm will come to him after you have taken me to him. I, too, know how to make words work for me.

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Chapter 7