Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (Seasons of the Sword #1)(13)

I thought with terror of poor Mieko, standing frail and alone out in the dining room. Why hadn’t she come back into the kitchen with us, or gone off with Kuniko? She made a dreadful sacrifice for us, I thought, and made it with the quiet dignity of a samurai woman, just as our father had always hoped that my sister and I would conduct ourselves. I was ready to call out to Mieko, to tell her to come in and hide with us, when I heard, through the clamor, two men entering the dining room.

Through the thin wall behind me, I heard one say, “Hey, Juro, look what we’ve found!”

“The pretty lady from the group at the crossroads, yesterday. Hey, pretty lady. Give a soldier a kiss?” I thought I recognized the voice of the samurai who had stopped us the previous evening.

I heard Mieko say, with that same polite tone that she seemed to use no matter what the occasion, “Please, gentlemen, go elsewhere. I do not wish to harm you.”

I do not wish to harm you?

The two soldiers laughed grimly and we could hear the sound of tables being knocked aside. One thumped into the wall against which my back was pressed. I could feel Toumi, Emi and myself all try to take a sympathetic gasp of terror for Mieko, but the space was too confined—we simply pressed up against each other even more tightly.

From the dining hall, we heard the sound of a high shriek, and then what sounded like a sigh. There were two thuds, and then the room beyond the wall was silent.

Battle raged elsewhere. Grunts, shouts, the clang of metal—it was too much sound to give me a picture of what was going on outside.

Then a new sound drowned out all the others. It roared like a huge wave breaking on the shore, but instead of crashing and retreating, it kept thundering toward us from the same direction that the cannon fire had come from.

It was the sound of hundreds of galloping horses.

Otō-san told me once—only once—about witnessing the charge of the Takeda cavalry at Midriver Island. He said the thunder of their hooves was both the most beautiful and most terrifying thing he had ever witnessed—except for the births of my sister and me.

The sounds of fighting around us gave way to panicked shouts and the sounds of running feet.

There was more shouting, and then the roar of the horses’ hooves came to a halt.

There was quiet for a few long moments, and then Emi gasped when the latch on the closet was raised. The door was flung open, and bright light blinded us. We all three—Emi, Toumi and myself—stiffened, ready to run, to fight for our lives if need be.

Aimaru stood in the door, his face as tense as ours must have been. “Good morning,” he said.

From the back door, the Little Brother entered, looking much less good-humored than he usually did. His bald head had a large bleeding gash on it. “Ssh!” he ordered. “We don’t know who those horsemen were.” He looked at all of us. “Where is Mieko-san?”

Each of us gave a gasp—in our relief, we had forgotten what had happened to poor Mieko. We burst through the doorway back into the dining area to see if we could help her.

Mieko knelt, her hair loose around her lovely, sad face. She was wiping a long, thin blade with a rust-brown kerchief. Before her lay two soldiers whose armor bore the emblem of Lord Imagawa. The smaller was indeed the samurai who had ordered us up the side road the day before. Both were lifeless, their faces frozen in shock.

Her knife clean, Mieko slipped the blade into a small, flat sheath. With her left hand, she gathered her hair into a bun at the back of her head and then with her right slid the covered blade in so that it neatly held her tresses in place.

She did all of this with the modesty and ritual decorum of a shrine maiden preparing tea and cakes for the gods.





7—Wind


Mieko stood calmly and bowed to us.

From a small curtain at the end of the hall opposite the kitchen, we heard a whimper. Aimaru sprinted toward it, his battered knife still in his hand. With a yell, he yanked down the curtain, and revealed the old innkeepers, huddled on the floor of their small room.

After a moment of shocked silence, Aimaru bowed to them. “Pardon me for intruding,” he said, as if he had merely turned in at the wrong door.

The old couple seemed barely to recognize that he was there.

We all stumbled out of the dining hall into the corridor. Two more Imagawa soldiers lay dead there, and the elder Little Brother was standing impassive above them. Emi and I started to run toward the front door to see who our rescuers might have been, but Lady Chiyome called out sharply, “Stay here, young idiots! We don’t know who those horsemen are!”

Shamed, we shrunk back toward the back of the corridor, stopping just shy of the dead soldiers who had been piled at the bottom of the staircase.

The two Little Brothers lumbered up toward the front of the hall, blades at the ready. The door was hanging from a single hinge, and a shard of sunlight thrust against the corridor wall. The younger Little Brother, his head still bleeding, crept up to the door and peeked through.

“It’s all right!” he shouted, “It’s the Takeda cavalry.”

I gasped at that: that our saviors should be the force that had been the nightmare of my father’s warrior career, and the enemy of his second patron, once he became a scribe. What have I gotten into? I wondered.

With Lady Chiyome herding us from behind, we all began to make our way toward the exit. I was more than a little terrified. Father had said that the Takeda cavalry were the wind, a mighty tempest that swept away everything in its path. Toumi pushed at my back, or I would have been frozen to the spot.