49.
Outraged Periods and Exclamation Points

JUST INSIDE THE INN’S ENTRANCE stood a complex of three banquet rooms, the inn’s best innovation, next to the bath. The first two rooms could be opened, as they were tonight, to form a large enough space for tables to be placed together for large dining parties, and the third room, smaller and more elegant than the others, was primarily meant for clandestine liaisons. It could be reached from the main hallway, but there was also a special panel leading to it from the back, perfect, the innkeeper liked to joke, for narrow escapes.

Lord Okubo had ordered places set in the smaller room for the women, so they could hide and listen to whatever might take place, and in the larger rooms a huge flower arrangement sat within the tokunoma, a simple three-branch combination, but with the middle branch springing halfway to the ceiling, making everyone in the inn feel that it, like the day they were all experiencing, was entirely too long.

But even with the longest of days, evening finally comes, and as this one fell to its dinner hour Tsune came down from upstairs, to join the others. She wore a black kimono with the slightest pattern of dark brown lines upon it, her face unpowdered and her eyes set solemnly for the night. Fumiko and Masako and Keiko awaited her in the hall. “Has Manjiro not returned yet from his prayers?” she asked. “Someone still needs to wake his father.”

When no one replied she took Keiko’s arm and looked with her niece toward the darkest end of the hall, where Keiki and Kyuzo, O-bata and Ichiro and the two Americans, were just then coming from the bath. When Kyuzo bowed toward Tsune, neck and shoulders loose within his kimono, Ace tried to follow his lead, smiling at Fumiko. Beneath the stairway Tsune had just descended was the passage that led to the smaller banquet room that Lord Okubo had ordered prepared for the women, and when they finally did see Manjiro, walking back from his meditation at the inn’s shrine, Fumiko hurried all the women that way, not even looking toward Ace.

“Quickly now,” she said. “O-bata, that means you, too. Let’s go in and leave the men alone.”

Tsune wanted a word with Keiki, one last chance to plead with him, to ask him to intervene concerning Manjiro’s postbattle intention to kill himself, and she would have taken a final moment of communion with Kyuzo, too, to assure him of her love. When she saw her nieces hesitate, however, she first helped her sister guide them toward the hallway, and when she tried to retreat again, Fumiko would not let her pass.

“There is no more time for anything,” she told her younger sister. “Do not invest yourself further, Tsune, let the men be men.”

Whether or not it was a scolding, Tsune knew that to disobey her sister now would reorder everything between them. And so she turned and allowed herself to be herded behind O-bata, into that clandestine room.

When the women were gone from the hallway Manjiro, who had waited in the garden, came inside. He looked at Keiki for a moment, and at the other ready warriors by his side, and then he turned and spoke to the Americans.

“My life has been dedicated to knowing you,” he said in English. “I took all my recent actions, full of mistakes as they were, only in order to return you safely to the ships from which you came. I thought I acted honorably, but I lost my way…”

He had more to say, words he had practiced at the shrine. He wanted to tell them that neither he nor his father had ever really intended to use them as pawns, that that had only been a ruse, something written in his father’s letter to Ueno, to make him want to bring Einosuke’s murderers to the inn this very night. He wanted to tell them that he knew without question that the subdeties of spirit which resided in all good men, resided in both of them, that he had seen it in Ace when first receiving the chocolates, and in Ned in his recent and most stunning bravery, the dignified way in which he confronted his injury. He had even planned on slipping into metaphor for a moment, saying he had “brought them onto a path he thought he knew well, but led them into a great unknown forest”—but in fact he thought better of it, for the good quality of the English he had used thus far gave him an extra reason to grieve, in the sudden understanding that when he finally put a blade to his belly, all those unending hours of study would spill out.

So though he would have plunged ahead heedlessly in earlier days, to make himself clear through constant explanation, now he only bowed, turning his mind to the other question he had prayed about at the shrine: not whether to kill himself, but whether or not to go back upstairs and wake his father.

He would not. He would let his father sleep and awaken to an accomplished fate.

The innkeeper’s wife had been playing her koto in the larger banquet rooms this last little while, sitting beneath that mammoth flower arrangement, but when everyone heard what could only be Ueno’s arrival at the inn’s front door she stopped. And a few seconds later the innkeeper came to tell them that their guests had arrived.

“I will end it quickly and alone,” Manjiro told the others, “so be ready to move out of the way.”

His plan, he thought, was simple. He would kill Einosuke’s murderers as soon as they were made known to him, kill Ueno, too, if he got the chance, then run back to the shrine and kill himself. He believed that by acting alone he would absolve his father, and when his father finally awoke to find everything done, coerce him into carrying on. Kyuzo and Ichiro were to fend off any soldiers that might intervene, but otherwise were under orders not to act at all.

The door was shaking when they walked toward it, the impatience of their visitor evident in its rattle.

“Hello?” Ueno called. “It’s raining out here. Someone open up!”

They were simple words, really, however plaintively spoken, but a strong sense of Einosuke came to Manjiro when he heard them, a renewed knowledge of how his brother, though always bemoaning Manjiro’s free and scholarly life, had in truth protected him, taking the mundane family duties upon himself. He felt sorry that he could offer only this, the death of his killers, when he should have thanked Einosuke, shown him greater deference when he was alive!

“You do it,” he told the innkeeper. “Open the door quickly and get out of the way.” He let his breath settle deep in his abdomen, and stood there waiting.

For the innkeeper, however, though Manjiro’s orders were certainly clear enough, there was a problem in complying, for he didn’t feel he could be duplicitous and welcome someone to his inn at the same time. He didn’t like it, he would never have sided with Ueno under normal circumstances, but an innkeeper’s responsibilities to his guests were as unambiguous as a samurai’s to his lord, so neither could he bring himself to commit a direct betrayal. It simply went against the innkeeper’s code.

He looked briefly at Kyuzo and Ichiro, feeling sure from his walk around the inn with them that they would understand, and then, though he did open the door, he did not get out of the way.

“Good evening, sir,” he said. “How many will be joining Lord Okubo’s representatives in our banquet room tonight?”

“Joining them?” barked Ueno. “I don’t intend to join anyone. I want to make this exchange and go. Why would anyone want to continue this pathetic charade?”

That Ueno had wanted to continue it, had been unable to quit his mad scheme, even after Lord Abe’s censure, was what Lord Okubo had relied on in his note.

As much as it blocked Manjiro’s view of his sworn enemy, the innkeeper’s body blocked Ueno’s view, also, so he didn’t know anyone else had heard his rude comments until Manjiro said, “A charade is not pathetic, sir, if it achieves its end. Was that not the central lesson of those paragraphs your disgraced Lord Abe liked so much?”

The innkeeper tried to move then, since his goal had been to in-hibit violence, not communication, but in his irritation with Manjiro’s words—“disgraced” and Lord Abe’s name in the same sentence!—Ueno took his short sword out of its scabbard and prodded the innkeeper with it. He hadn’t meant to do it, he’d intended, in fact, to pull the entire scabbard from his belt, only giving the innkeeper a humiliating nudge, but his sword’s proper scabbard had been ruined in the trout stream that morning and the one he’d borrowed from his aide was too large. As a result he pulled out the sword itself and poked a three-inch hole in the innkeeper’s side. It was as wide and deep a cut as a short sword could make. So much for the omen of the trout.

The innkeeper didn’t yell. At first, in fact, he only looked around behind him in surprise. But then he sat down on the top step of his entryway and said very quietly, “There is likely to be a mess here soon. Someone get my wife.”

It was a restrained and dignified response, very much in keeping with that innkeeper’s code but punctuated, as he’d predicted, by drops of blood that plopped upon the floor around him like outraged periods and exclamation points.

“My poor sir,” said Keiki, quickly coming forward, and then to Ueno he said, “Stand back away from him, fool, look what you have done! Can’t you even knock on someone’s door without causing grievous insult?!”

“You again!” Ueno hissed. “The impudent and untried heir! Don’t you know when to shut up?”

A fight between Ueno and Keiki, of all people, was most unacceptable to Manjiro. He would do the cutting if cutting was to be done. But when the innkeeper slumped against the nearest wall and Ichiro came over with his wife, the idea of anyone fighting just then had to be put off, unacceptable or not. Tsune ran from the secret women’s room with towels, and O-bata came too, and grabbed a big bottle of saké, bringing it over as a cleansing agent.

Manjiro was at a loss, staring first at the innkeeper’s wound, then at the tip of Ueno’s short sword, while the wounded man’s wife held her husband’s head against her breasts. “There really is a lot of blood here,” she said. “Someone better get the doctor, he’s just a couple of doors down the street.”

Most of the others had come forward by then, too, to see what they might do to help. “It don’t look like he’s in pain,” Ned said, “just like me with my nose,” but when Tsune pulled her pen knife from her obi and slit open the innkeeper’s kimono, everyone was shocked by what she revealed. The wound was far worse than they’d expected, a deep and yawning thing that opened and shut like the blood-filled mouth of a landed fish, each time the innkeeper took a breath.

When his wife saw the extent of her husband’s injury she turned to Ueno and said, “Do me a favor, sir, and leave our inn right now.” Her husband’s inherent dignity, it seemed, had been somehow transferred to her.

There was, after all, only one man standing behind Ueno, not the three Manjiro had expected, so though he still touched his sword he couldn’t bring himself to use it yet, not with the innkeeper sorely wounded and without first finding all of Einosuke’s murderers, plus his missing head. It would have been easy to kill Ueno, though, for when he bent to examine the wound he had inflicted, his neck and chest were exposed.

It was an impossible moment for Manjiro, everyone in motion now and all his sense of drama depleted, but when Tsune got the innkeeper to his feet again there was really nothing he could do but forget his own agenda for a while and help carry the poor man back inside, however unwieldy his heart was in his chest.

“Let’s lay him on the banquet table,” said his wife. “Someone clear it off.”

Fumiko pushed the food out of the way, while Keiki got a cushion and placed it under the innkeeper’s head. Keiko had come out by then, too, and tried to help by keeping the blood in check with towels. But it leaked out to cover her hands, and flowed down her forearms to drip onto the tatami from her elbows.

“What about the doctor,” the innkeeper’s wife said again, “has anyone gone for him yet?”

Ichiro had left a moment earlier, but not for the doctor. Rather, he had gone to fetch the innkeeper’s father’s ancient samurai sword, pulling it from that crossbeam down the hall. He brought it back and laid it next to the wounded man’s face, thinking it might remind him of his family’s long tradition and give him strength. He told the innkeeper’s wife, “I will get the doctor now,” then he pushed his way past Ueno, utterly unrecognized as one of the men he had hired by number, and nearly knocking him down.

When he righted himself again Ueno looked at Manjiro and fairly yelled, “This was an accidental stabbing, you know that! It was nothing more than a problem with a borrowed and overlarge scabbard! Damn it anyway, I didn’t come here to stab your stupid innkeeper. I’ve got your brother’s killers at the river and I’ve kept my men there, too, as a sign of good faith. I see you have the barbarians here, so we could effect our exchange right now. Two killers for two musicians, what do you say?”

It was another mistake, but he saw it too late.

“Our laborers said there were three murderers,” Manjiro said, “and the only barbarian in the room just now is your own unworthy self.”

Ueno opened his mouth to answer but the innkeeper surprised everyone just then by suddenly sitting back up. “I’ve got a good mind to report you to the authorities!” he said.

Unfortunately, however, he had lost his sense of direction and was facing Keiki instead of Ueno. He took hold of Keiki’s sleeve and, with a great deal of effort, pulled himself to his feet again.

“Stop this now, sir, and rest,” said Keiki. “Until the doctor gets here to plug up that wound you must not exert yourself.”

But the innkeeper had looked back down at the table and let his eyes linger on that which Ichiro had brought him, his father’s old samurai sword. And with the second surprise of unusual quickness, he picked it up and wheeled around again to charge, with unerring accuracy this time, on a true death trip toward Ueno. There was no scabbard on the sword, and its blade was honed.

“Stop!” screamed Manjiro, and Fumiko pulled her daughters out of the way, but it was Kyuzo who successfully intervened. He jumped onto the top of the banquet table, slid across the spilt blood and saké, and knocked the innkeeper far enough off course that his sword not only missed its target, but pierced that long middle stem of the flower arrangement. And when he swung the sword a second time the flower came with it, lightly slapping Ueno’s face.

Ueno pulled his other sword out then, and thrust it into the innkeeper’s throat, neatly severing his jugular vein and flipping him back onto the table at the same time. The innkeeper’s body flopped like a fish and his eyes darted everywhere, then settled on the ceiling, where he could detect a bit of dust that he wished he could tell his wife about. He couldn’t speak, however, for blood pulsed out of his mouth with quickly diminishing power, to the last few beats of his heart.

“Ohhh!” wailed his wife, and while the others locked their eyes on this newest recent horror, Ueno escaped from the inn.

Two men gave chase, Ichiro, who had just then come back with the doctor, and Kyuzo. But when they got outside both Ueno and the man who had accompanied him were gone.