Sowing Ghosts 11.2

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[continuing chapter 11]

I did not just hear that, Hiroki told himself. The drug is making me hallucinate.

“How old is he now, do you think?” Lord Hosokawa’s face took on an exaggerated look of calculation. “He looks to be sixteen or seventeen. As I said, a fine-looking young man.”

I cannot escape this. Should I have fought more strongly against the decision to come here? No, he knew that he hadn’t fought the decision at all, nor had he wanted to. Coming to Kyoto had been as enticing a prospect as it was painful, and just as he had not resisted the draw of the capital when Lord Tanuma had first assigned him to the embassy, so he had to stop hiding now.

At least from this strange and dangerous boy. “He’s actually older than you,” Hiroki said, his words sounding slow and distorted in his own ears. “He should turn twenty later this year. If I’m remembering correctly, which I very well may not.”


“Your family is the Sanjonishi,” Lord Hosokawa said. “Which must mean that you are the younger dead son, Nobutane.”

“The younger dead son?” Did I miscalculate the dose this morning?

“Ah, so you have not heard. Your older brother, Nobushiro, died five years ago. Your son is head of the family now, which means he has inherited the position of junior minister of the left to the emperor.

“Not that this gives him anything to do, as I’m sure you well understand.”

“I remember my father being that active, yes,” Hiroki said, feeling bitterness on his tongue. “Might I ask why you are so curious as to unearth all of these secrets, Lord Hosokawa? Surely you must have realized that if I did not volunteer this information it was because I wanted it to stay buried.”

“I confess that at first I was merely curious, Lord Nobu — no, I think that I will continue to call you Yoshino Hiroki. I like that name much more than the one you carried before. At any rate, it was clear to me from your accent and your choice of words that you were not the provincial warrior you want everyone to think you are. So of course I wanted to know the truth about you, just for its own sake.”

He leaned forward just a bit, but enough to give Hiroki the sensation of having been pinned to his futon. “And then it occurred to me that your keeping secrets from me could prove dangerous to my position. Please remember, Lord Yoshino — did you choose that family name for the shrine, the mountain or the river? — that I have grown up in a family where secrets are both numerous and deadly. If I left something about you unknown that I could have discovered for myself, I might be making myself vulnerable to attack from an unknown direction.

“I am already too vulnerable to attack from directions I know about.”

Hiroki turned away from Lord Hosokawa for a moment, fighting the mixture of shame and misery that assailed him whenever he allowed himself to be dragged back to his calamitous youth. Then, just as quickly as it had settled on him, the feeling vanished. There was something to be said for pain-relieving drugs beyond their medicinal virtues, perhaps.

“I married in the fourth year of Eishō, when I was fifteen,” he said, shifting back to look at Lord Hosokawa. “Younger than the age you are now, yes?” Lord Hosokawa nodded. “I was a younger son so I was able to choose my own wife. Or at least so I thought. And for a year we were very happy, my wife and I. She presented me with a son, and even though the world around us was little more than war and burnings and disaster, in my home none of that was allowed to intrude.”

He took a deep breath. “What I am going to tell you now is known by only one other person, and if you speak any of this to anyone — including her — then you will be my enemy, Hosokawa Katsunata, and I will destroy you. Is this understood?”

Lord Hosokawa’s eyebrows rose. “You think to threaten me?”

Is that what I did there? “I want you to understand that some things are never to be spoken of. I will not tell you my wife’s name, though I’ve no doubt you can learn it if you wish. Nor will I speak my son’s name, though you already know that. I have made promises, Lord Hosokawa, and if you force me to break them the gods will be very unhappy.”

“What in the world happened to you?” Lord Hosokawa leaned back, eyes wide. “This is not the polite behaviour of a kuge. This is not the speech of a member of the nobility.”

“She took my son,” Hiroki said. Now everything seemed to be slow: his voice, the movements of Lord Hosokawa and Jiro, even the steam rising from his medicinal cup. “My mother. She stole my son from me. Said my wife was despicable, unfit. My father was dying, homes around us were going up in flames, and she took my son away from me.

“My wife … died. I intend to say no more about it. But with my family gone as if it was smoke being lifted upward, I thought I had no more reason to live myself. So I joined the armies of the chief minister, Hosokawa Sumimoto, who was fighting the invasion of the capital by” —

“By his cousin, and my cousin, Hosokawa Takakuni. Who is at present the chief minister of the Omi shogunate.” He blew out a whistling breath. “Those were bad times, certainly.”

Hiroki snorted. “If that was war, I’ll happily take peace. My lord Kanrei Sumimoto put up no fight at all. The only real damage he did was to the city itself, which he set on fire when he and his shōgun fled. So I was left with nothing: no family, not even my adopted cause to serve.”

“You weren’t really interested in the cause,” Lord Hosokawa said. “I have known men in a position similar to yours.”

“Yes, of course you are right. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to die, Hosokawa-dono. And why not?

“But the gods apparently felt differently, because one morning they spoke to me on the mountain near the Yoshino shrine — in a way, you were right about that. I took the name from all of them, shrine and mountain and river. Because I felt I had been reborn there. I wandered the country for nearly fifteen years, becoming the man I am today, before I arrived in Kozuke province and Lord Tanuma accepted me into his service.”

He pulled back the futon and his kimono, exposing his injured leg. “Jiro, I want these cloths replaced. They are no longer cold enough.”

“That’s impressive,” Lord Hosokawa said when the bruised, swollen knee had been revealed and Jiro had taken the cloths away. “How did that happen?”

“That,” Hiroki said, “is what I wanted to talk with you about. Do you have any more questions about my history, or is your curiosity satisfied for now?”

Next    Characters    Chapter 1    Chapter 2    Chapter 3    Chapter 4    Chapter 5    Chapter 6
Chapter 7    Chapter 8    Chapter 9    Chapter 10    Chapter 11