all the trouble with Shichio, another son of a pox-riddled bitch whose head Goemon should have separated from his shoulders. And now came all the trouble with that money-grubbing lout Yasuda Kenbei. All because of one woman. It was as if some evil spirit possessed her—and if so, Goemon should have cut it out of her. He knew that now. Honor and friendship had stayed his hand, but if he’d ever wanted to be a true friend to Daigoro, he should have put that madwoman out of her misery.
No. If he’d done that, he and Daigoro would have come to blows. Goemon could not abide that thought. Better to ride with him and help him weather his many storms than to draw steel against him. But how many more storms would come? In Daigoro’s life they seemed to be endless.
“The Okumas have fared little better than the Odas,” Goemon said, omitting the rest. “All because your son could not be satisfied with a decisive victory in a fair duel. Now you will stand aside and we will enter. Do I make myself clear?”
Oda looked angry enough to draw his sword. He studied Daigoro, whose only sign of life was the blood trickling out of his many wounds. Then he shook his head in disbelief. Reluctantly he stepped aside. His derision had not subsided in the least, but now he directed it at himself.
Goemon rolled Daigoro through the open doorway before Oda had a chance to change his mind. “Show me to the cleanest room you have,” he said, pushing the wheelbarrow over a carpet of wet brown leaves. “And summon your healers, if you did not dismiss them along with your gardeners.”
34
Daigoro awoke to the nauseating sensation of a knife sliding out of his body.
“Hold him, hold him, he’s awake,” someone said. Daigoro did not recognize the voice. Through blurred eyes he saw an old grandmother hunched over him, gnawing her lower lip with crooked yellow teeth. He could not see her hands, but it felt like she was stabbing his shoulder with needles. Whatever she was doing, it demanded all of her concentration.
He tried to flinch away, but iron-hard hands held him tight. The feeling of being trapped automatically made him struggle. The frowning woman tsked him and jabbed him with something sharp. The knife slid farther out of him. Blood spilled down his back in a hot cascade. He twitched and wriggled but the hands held fast. “Daigoro, lie still,” said a deep voice. “You’ll tear your stitches loose.”
The voice was familiar. “Go-Goemon?”
“I’m here. Now show a little patience and stop your squirming.”
* * *
It was another day before Daigoro could keep himself awake for as long as an hour, a day after that before he began to feel like a human being again. He had a splitting headache, the kind he got when he went too long without water. He’d spilled too much of his lifeblood on the floor of that shrine. The only remedy was to drink enough to drown a whale. That gave him an hourly need to make water, but getting out of bed made the walls spin. And when his head and his bladder were not pestering him, Katsushima continuously forced food on him. The healers insisted the best medicine for drastic blood loss was chicken livers and ginseng root—bowlful by heaping bowlful, enough to suffocate him.
At least he would choke to death in comfort. He lay on a soft futon on clean bedclothes. Daigoro gathered that Katsushima had ordered the lord of the house to lodge his guests in the cleanest room in the compound. The lord’s steward was none too pleased, for it was his quarters that became the hospital. Daigoro never got the man’s proper name—he went only by Karei, which meant “steward”—but he gleaned quite a bit about his displaced host just from how he kept his rooms. Karei was tidy to a fault. His bedroll, scroll cupboards, and writing tools were all here, suggesting that he spent the great majority of his life in these spare, orderly rooms. Daigoro had no doubt that Karei’s quarters did not usually stink of blood and chicken livers.
“I have a confession to make,” Daigoro told Katsushima, pitying Karei every bit as much as himself. The livers had coated the roof of his mouth like thick, wet fur. “I’m giving serious thought to killing the cook.”
“Don’t. Lord Oda’s serving staff all abandoned him when he stopped paying them. The healing woman who stitched