CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WITHDRAWING
“I’m not surprised,” Hiroki told him. “It’s appallingly badly written.”
“Worse than a child’s brushwork,” Shiro said, nodding his agreement. Hiroki noted with some amusement that, while Shiro hadn’t admitted his own failure to be able to read the note, neither had he offered to enlighten Tetsuo as to its contents.
“So tell me, somebody, what it says.” Tetsuo was definitely upset about his inability to decipher the note.
“As I have had several opportunities to wrestle with this mess,” Hiroki told them, “I will do my humble best to make some sense of it. No, I take that back. I can tell you what it says, but to make sense of the sort of mind that could have written it is a bit more than I can manage just now.” He transferred the reins to his left hand and lifted the note so that he could clearly see its blotched, misshapen characters.
“Kita,” he read: “On receipt of this note have the bearer escort you to the house of Akamatsu Noritoyo. On arrival, kill the bearer immediately, then kill Akamatsu. Both of them know too much. Be certain nobody sees you do this.
“When you have finished, take the road to Nara. You must seek a woman named Inaki Sakiko. When you find her, kill her. It will be best to do this on the road, but if you cannot then you must kill her where you find her. She is on her way to Hokke-ji.” He felt a familiar clench in his bowels at just the sound of his mother’s name.
He did not reveal this to anyone; refolding the note he put it back into his sleeve. “Now you see why I was so anxious that we set out immediately.”
“But Kita, if that truly was his name, is dead now,” Shiro said. “So I don’t understand why I had to leave my bath when I was finally starting to relax.”
“Can you promise me that Kita was the only person to be given such a note?” I am already dreading meeting with that woman, Hiroki thought, so don’t make this any more difficult than it already is, Shiro.
“Well, no.”
“Right, then. Besides, if the other two were killed because they knew too much, then I want to believe it’s safe to assume the same about the woman Inaki. If I’m correct, she will know at least some of the reason why Lady Tomiko’s killer did what he did.”
“Inaki,” Tetsuo said, gazing into the distance. “A familiar name. We’ve encountered her already, haven’t we?”
“You haven’t,” Hiroki said. “I have, and told you about her. She was with Lady Tomiko’s body when I was sent to look at it. So far I have been unable to persuade anyone to explain to me what she was doing there.”
“I remember now,” Tetsuo said. “And you said something about her coming from the emperor’s palace.”
“And we will never be allowed in there,” Shiro said. “We’re nowhere nearly exalted enough.”
You wouldn’t think that if you could actually see the squalor in which the emperor lives now, Hiroki thought. “But now that we know where the woman is going — or already is — we have no need to request admission to the palace grounds,” he told them.
“What is Nara?” Tetsuo asked. “Is it a shrine or something?”
“It is a town,” Hiroki said. “Once it was a city. In fact, once it was the emperor’s city: the capital of Japan. That was a thousand years ago, though. Today it mostly belongs to the deer and tanuki. The old temples are still active, though, and that’s what this Hokke-ji must be.”
He had never been to Nara, not even in his former life, and even though his family had originated there. So why was his mother suddenly so interested in this Hokke temple? And could there be a connection between her and Miyoshi Motonaga? After all, Nara was an important part of Yamashiro province, and Motonaga was the province’s deputy military governor.
“A thousand years ago?” Shiro sounded impressed. “Those temples must have been built by the Buddha himself.”
“Hardly,” Tetsuo said. “The Buddha was Chinese. It was his disciples who built the temples and brought the Word and the Sutras to Japan.”
“He was from a land even farther away than China,” Hiroki told them. “And he lived a very long time ago. Possibly long enough ago that he was one of the first creations of the Sun Goddess herself.”
“You talk about him as if you knew the Buddha personally,” Shiro said, laughing. “I know you’re an old man, Hiroki, but you’re not that old.”
Tetsuo joined in the laughter, but though Hiroki smiled, what he thought was, Some days I certainly feel that old. And this is one of those days, I’m afraid.
What was hiding at Hokke-ji?
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Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14
Chapter 15
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