Winter Raven (Path of the Samurai Book 1) Page 15

A shout from the skipper. ‘Hey.’

  The samurai followed the man’s gaze. A boat was drifting towards them on the current. It emerged out of the white vapour, indistinct at first, then growing in detail and solidity. A ghost ship. The sail was torn. There were no apparent crew. The skipper stood at the prow and hailed the boat.

  ‘Hey, anyone?’

  The unmanned vessel continued straight towards them. There was no time to manoeuvre. The boats collided with a heavy jolt. The girl gripped the mast to avoid being tipped in the water. The samurai glanced towards the explosives lashed in the cargo pile, grateful the impact hadn’t triggered their detonation. The two vessels juddered as they slid alongside one another. The skipper jumped into the vacant boat and used a mooring rope to lash the two vessels together.

  ‘Look,’ said Masaie pointing upward. He clutched the talisman hung round his neck. The skeletal remains of a man nailed to the mast. His hands had been pulled above his head and an iron spike driven through both wrists. His crow-pecked face was turned towards the sky. He had no eyes and his mouth was taut open in a rictus scream.

  The skipper checked the bottom of the boat. He pulled back a tarp exposing jumbled bodies. Arrows protruded from flesh.

  ‘A family,’ said the skipper, conducting a dispassionate survey of the carnage. ‘Father. Mother. Three children. From the angle of the arrows I’d say they died in position. Huddled at the bottom of the boat while a couple of men fired from the bank. Looks like she was trying to shield the children. Must have been close range. The arrows were at full velocity. They stabbed right through her and out the other side.’

  ‘They smell bad,’ said Ariyo.

  ‘Cold weather has slowed decomposition. They’ve been drifting dead for three, four days, at a guess.’

  The skipper patted down their clothing. ‘No valuables. Light clothing. Bare feet.’

  ‘You think bandits did this?’ asked the girl

  The samurai nodded. ‘We’re a long way from Kyoto. A long way from any law.’

  ‘They nailed him to the mast. They must be animals.’

  ‘Animals kill for food. They don’t relish another creature’s pain and fear. Only humans torture for fun.’

  ‘When do we get weapons?’ asked Ariyo, contemplating the arrow-pierced bodies.

  ‘As soon as we land,’ said the samurai.

  ‘We should have them now.’

  ‘When we land.’

  ‘What should we do with the bodies?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘We don’t have time to dig. But maybe we should light the boat. Make a pyre.’

  ‘Just let them be,’ said the samurai. ‘They are beyond our help.’

  The skipper untethered the death boat and pushed it away with his foot. It caught the current and slowly drifted past. The samurai contemplated dense woodland at the shore. The girl stood beside him.

  ‘Savage times,’ he said. ‘War. Famine. They create monsters.’

  She nodded, studying the shadows between the trees. She felt a skin-crawling sense they were under observation.

  ‘We’ll post a guard each night once we get ashore,’ said the samurai. ‘Take turns.’

  The girl nodded, turned and watched the death boat drift away. The crucified man slowly receded, grew indistinct, and was lost behind a veil of white vapour.

  * * *

  The samurai checked his chart. ‘This is it,’ he told the company, gesturing to a headland emerging from the mist. ‘This is where we leave the boat.’

  The skipper steered the boat towards the bank. The mate jumped onto the jetty and lashed the mooring rope to a piling while the skipper lowered the sail. The convicts glanced around, reluctant to leave the safety of the boat. The wild grassland seemed pregnant with threat as if the vegetation itself would attack and entwine their ankles as soon as they stepped onto firm ground.

  ‘We ought to get going,’ said the samurai. ‘Travel as far as we can before nightfall then find some tree cover.’

  He climbed onto the jetty, rotted boards creaking beneath his feet. The convicts followed. The girl jumped last. She stretched and paced. It felt good to be on stable ground, to have freedom of movement.

  The crewmen untied the cargo and threw the packages ashore. The skipper grabbed the package of explosives like he intended to hurl it from the boat.

  ‘Careful,’ shouted the samurai. The skipper handed him the package and the samurai gently placed it on the jetty planks. When the boat was fully unloaded the crewmen untethered the mooring rope and raised the sail.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the samurai as the boat pulled away. ‘Have a safe voyage.’

  The skipper and his mate didn’t reply. The travellers had been cargo, nothing more. The consignment had been delivered. Time to head home.

  The convicts watched the boat depart. It receded, turned the headland and was gone.

  ‘Let’s get the supplies on shore,’ said the samurai. ‘This jetty feels like it will collapse any moment.’

  They laid the supplies on the grass. The samurai sorted through the equipment – furs, bows and dried food – and divided up the gear ready to be lashed to wooden pack-frames.

  ‘Best load up and get going. It will be nightfall soon.’

  ‘Weapons,’ said Ariyo. ‘You promised us weapons.’

  The samurai untied a canvas roll and threw it open exposing a clutter of swords and knives. Each man picked a sword and drew it from its saya. They held the blades up to the light inspecting blood channels and temper-lines.

  ‘Careful with those,’ said the samurai. ‘We’re bound to meet a few locals over the coming days. Exercise a little self-control. Don’t get carried away just because you have steel in your hand. Keep your swords sheathed until we need them.’

  The samurai pulled his own sword and saya from his obi. He looked at it a long while then he gave it to the girl.

  ‘It’s a good blade. Clay-forged. It’s yours now. Look after it.’

  The girl looked at the sword in her hands, shocked that the samurai would give away something so fundamental to his identity.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘You’ll need a weapon.’

  He picked an old sword from the canvas roll, testing it for balance.

  ‘This will do.’

  Masaie untied a couple of sacks and shook out the contents.

  ‘Look. Armour.’

  A jumble of helmets, breast plates, groin and shoulder guards. The samurai picked up a helmet and turned it in his hands.

  ‘That stuff is way too heavy to carry,’ he said, ‘although it might be useful to wear a cuirass beneath your kimono where no one can see it.’

  ‘You should wear one,’ said the girl.

  ‘I haven’t worn armour for a long while.’

  ‘You should put a chest plate beneath your clothes.’

  The samurai nodded. He could no longer rely on swordcraft alone to prevail in a fight. He would need to protect himself from blows he could no longer block.

  ‘Take whatever armour you can wear concealed beneath your clothing,’ he instructed the convicts. ‘Throw the rest into the water.’

  The men shouldered their packs.

  ‘Masaie. You’re carrying the munitions.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you’re the best man for the task.’

  ‘We should draw straws.’

  ‘No, we can’t trust to luck. We need someone fit, strong and sure-footed. It has to be you.’

  Masaie looked doubtfully at the pack.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ariyo, slapping the man on the back. ‘If it explodes, you won’t know anything about it.’

  Masaie carefully picked up the pack and put his arms through the straps. He was white with fear.

  They team headed out thrashing through tall grass, each of them giving Masaie a wide berth. The samurai took the lead. The girl followed close behind.

  Early evening. The convicts breasted a hill and looked do
wn on a cluster of thatched houses centred round a single storey inn next to a river. Smoke curled from the flue. The hamlet was bathed in amber light.

  ‘We should keep going,’ the samurai advised the convicts. ‘Best if we camp out of sight.’

  ‘Maybe we should stay at the inn tonight,’ said Tameyo. ‘Conserve our food. Might even be able to buy provisions. Some eggs, maybe some chicken. We’d be warm and dry.’

  The samurai shook his head. An evening spent in a tavern would present too many opportunities for the team to draw attention to themselves.

  ‘There’s a bounty out on our heads. News won’t have reached this far out. Not just yet. But a few days from now these folks will go to the nearest village and see a notice in the square. Somebody will read it to them and tell them about the reward. They’ll remember us. They’ll remember which direction we were headed.’

  ‘And we’ll be long gone. This is might be our last decent meal for a while. In fact this might be the last decent meal we ever eat. We deserve this.’

  ‘They won’t have any wine. Probably tasted nothing but water their whole lives.’

  ‘But they’ve got a fire and roof over their heads.’

  ‘All right,’ said the samurai, addressing the company. ‘We’ll stay the night. But don’t start any trouble, understand? That’s how most of you ended up in the stockade. Idiotic bravado. Time to exercise a little self-control. We eat. We sleep. We leave. Nothing more.’

  * * *

  The travellers pushed open the crude door and entered the inn. They stood a moment and let their eyes adjust. They found themselves in a wide, low-ceilinged room. They breathed the sweet smell of wood smoke from an open fire. Laughter, chatter and the clink of cups immediately ceased and all eyes turned on the new arrivals. The locals appraised scarred faces and noted swords half-hidden beneath cloaks. The samurai smiled and bowed trying to put the villagers at ease. ‘We are travellers looking for a little warmth on a cold night.’

  ‘Then close the door,’ shouted the innkeeper from the back of the room. ‘We’re losing heat.’

  The samurai obediently closed the door but had to open it again as a man headed outside for a piss. He got jostled as the man pushed past.

  ‘So sorry,’ said the samurai with a gracious smile, bowing in apology.

  Even with an arm missing the samurai could, if he chose, kill most of the men in the room. He could draw a short-blade knife and dance table to table, become a throat-slitting whirlwind. Instead he chose to retreat into himself, become a shadow, an absence. Become so insubstantial, so unthreatening, nobody was aware he was present.

  He chose a spot by a wall and lowered himself onto the packed earth floor. The girl knelt beside him. The tavern was the large front room of a farmer’s house. He provided hospitality to his neighbours each evening. They brought rice and a few vegetables which got cooked up and shared around. The samurai had coins in his purse to pay for their meal but money was little use outside major cities. Rural communities ran a barter economy.

  He signalled a maid. She brought a jug of water and cups. He gave her a bag of barley as payment for a night’s lodging. She ladled rice from a pot hung over the fire and returned a minute later with two steaming bowls. The samurai and the girl sat in silence and ate rice with their fingers. He hoped people would get the message: they were impoverished travellers passing through – a cripple and his daughter making a pilgrimage; nothing out of the ordinary. They sat back replete and pushed their empty bowls aside. The samurai stared across the room at the burning logs in the fire pit and watched flames dance. He rubbed tired eyes.

  Masaie groped a couple of the maids. He sat near the fire with a girl either side, his arms round their waists. They talked and laughed. The girls hugged against him. The samurai scanned the crowd and tried to gauge the reaction of the locals. Maybe they would resent outsiders touching their women. A local farmer might hate to see Tameyo pawing his girl. He might tolerate local men heading out back with her but might draw the line at a stranger. Such a man might get resentful and take a swing. The samurai watched the convicts and watched the crowd, ready to step in if a fight seemed imminent.

  Tameyo sat alone. He finished one bowl of food and signalled for another. He panted as he shovelled rice taking hurried gulps of water to wash down each mouthful so he could eat some more. It was the behaviour of a life-long criminal; a man subject to repeated and prolonged incarceration. Convicts imprisoned for many months on a subsistence diet of millet gruel tended to gorge themselves when they came across extra food. If they managed to steal a handful of rice from the prison cook, they would shove it into their mouth before one of their fellow convicts snatched it from their grasp. And once released they would eat incessantly.

  The samurai had heard of a thief that developed a fixation for peaches while he was serving a term for robbery. He was part of a punishment crew charged with repairing road-bridges on the route from Nara to Kyoto. He dreamed of peaches while he cut logs and hauled lumber. He couldn’t think of anything else. It became a mania. He would lie on the grass each night, shivering beneath a blanket and stare up at the stars fantasising about the taste and texture of the fruit while his fellow prisoners slept. He was released late spring. He didn’t make it further than the nearest peach orchard. Locals saw him staggering through the orchard, pockets full of fruit, peach in each hand. He gorged himself. Juice ran down his chin and soaked his shirt. He ate until he puked then ate some more. They had to overpower the man and tie him up before he ate himself to death.

  Ariyo sat in shadows with his back to the wall. He ate slow and surveyed the room, alert for any sign of challenge or threat. The samurai caught his eye. They stared each other down. The samurai’s expression said: Relax. We don’t need trouble.

  The girl looked around. ‘It’s good to be warm. It’s good to be surrounded by people.’

  The samurai nodded. The girl watched the maids chatter and laugh. They were local girls, probably orphans with no one to support them, making the best of the only opportunity this rural backwater had to offer.

  Maybe they laughed to please the men. Perhaps when the last revellers staggered from the inn and the night was done their faces relaxed into masks of misery and exhaustion. Or maybe they were genuinely happy. They were warm, they were fed, they didn’t have to work the fields. Or maybe the line between pretence and genuine emotion merged years ago and they no longer knew the difference.

  She could hear a rising wind outside. The shutters rattled. The flue in the ceiling whistled and moaned. The tavern keeper crossed the room and threw sacking at the foot of the door to block a draft.

  The samurai took the opportunity to ask the man about bandits.

  ‘Yes, they’re out there,’ said the tavern keeper, gesturing to the darkness that lay beyond the wattle walls of the farmstead. ‘Bands of starving folk, some of them ex-soldiers. They hunt like wolves but won’t attack the village itself. They won’t attack a tavern full of men, but they steal livestock. And they’ll lie in wait and pick off isolated travellers. So wherever you folks are going, go as a group. Cover as much ground as you can in daylight. Hide yourselves each night. Don’t drop your guard for a second.’

  The evening grew late. One by one the villagers got up, said farewell to their companions and returned to their homes.

  When the room was near empty and conversation had died away the girl pulled the hichiriki from her waistband and began to play.

  The convicts were lulled by the music. It soothed like a mother’s caress taking them back to childhood, to the very cusp of memory, that brief taste of happiness before they were brutalised by poverty and the desperate hour-by-hour struggle to survive.

  The men sat round the fire, lost in thought and watched the flames slowly die.

  Commander Raku and his men climbed a hill on the coast of The Freshwater Sea, riding parallel to a cliff edge. They pulled fur cloaks around themselves as the night wind grew strong. The landscape was lit by intermi
ttent moonlight. They couldn’t see the lake beneath them, but they could hear waves lap the shore.

  ‘We ought to rest the horses,’ said Tadatoo.

  ‘No,’ said Raku. ‘They’ve got a two-day head start but the bad weather will have slowed them down. We can make up time if we keep moving.’

  He flicked the reins and urged his horse onward along the moonlit hillside.

  The convicts laboured through tall grass. Flat terrain replaced by steep gradients as they approached a range of wooded hills. They entered a gorge. Mist clung to the valley walls. They forged a path through a succession of bamboo thickets. The samurai walked at their head beating back brush with his sword.

  ‘We should camp,’ called Tameyo from the back of the column. He stopped for a moment and stretched his back.

  ‘Couple of miles further. Let’s get as far as we can in daylight,’ Said the samurai, hacking thick bamboo stalks. He paused now and again and watched the treetops. If birds suddenly took flight, or if the woodland around them grew preternaturally quiet, it might warn of an ambush. The gorge was the kind of place bandits might secret themselves between raids.

  The team continued down the valley single file. The forest canopy blocked out the sun. They moved through dappled twilight. Masaie stepped carefully. He surveyed the ground ahead of him, anxious not to be tripped by a rock or a protruding root.

  ‘We should have skirted these hills,’ he said, sweating from the weight of the cargo and the fear of being blown to apart.

  ‘We need to keep off the roads,’ said the samurai. ‘Avoid any border checkpoints.’

  ‘I don’t like this place. Too many shadows.’

  ‘We’re not children. We’re men. We don’t have to be afraid of the dark.’

  They reached a waterfall where run-off from the hills cascaded into a deep plunge-pool. They drank and washed, rested and raised their faces to weak sunlight. Tameyo and Masaie stripped naked and swam.

  The girl massaged her sore feet. Ariyo prowled the edge of the clearing and kept watch.