in search of his final resting place. If I give you a vial of his ashes, will you bury it where he fell?”
“I swear it.”
“Then in exchange I will carry this letter of yours to the Lady in the North. Unopened and unread, upon my word. I ask only one thing of you: write it quickly, then be gone from my house.”
* * *
Daigoro was not as quick in writing his letter as his host might have liked. Katsushima readied their horses and still Daigoro hadn’t finished. Then Katsushima cajoled the healing woman in the kitchen into providing them with a little food for the ride. Daigoro only made negative progress: he set a candle flame to his first draft, scattered the ashes in the courtyard, and started afresh with a blank page.
It was hard to know what to write. He hadn’t forgotten what Aki had told him: don’t provide your enemy the means to defeat you. If Oda was as good as his word, then Daigoro could tell Nene anything he liked. If he was false, then Oda would betray him to Shichio at the first opportunity. It hardly mattered that Oda had never heard of Shichio. He’d already guessed Daigoro was a wanted man; he had only to announce Daigoro’s name and Shichio’s bear hunters would come straight to his door.
Thus if Daigoro set terms in his letter for how he and Nene should meet, he might as well write his own death poem. But if he did not set terms for meeting her, then how could they complete their pact? He needed a second audience with her, but it was too dangerous to nominate a place or a time.
“It’s dangerous to write anything,” Katsushima insisted. He knew the classics as well as Aki did. Sun Tzu’s famous maxim was at the core of Katsushima’s fighting style: He wins his battles by making no mistakes. The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity to defeat the enemy. “This letter opens you to defeat,” Katsushima said, standing above the little desk where Daigoro sat and wrote.
“Only if Lord Oda has forgotten the virtues of bushido.”
“No. He need not abandon them; he need only be distracted for a moment. Gold, sake, pettiness, grief; any of these might persuade him to forget his oath to you. He might come to regret his betrayal within the hour, but by then it will be too late.”
“All right, all right,” Daigoro said. “At least your version is easy to write.”
Dipping his brush, he wrote three words. I have it. Then he folded and sealed the letter and they made ready to leave.
36
I have it.
You clever boy, Nene thought. He was right not to trust his messenger. Oda Tomonosuke was a broken man. That much was clear by his windswept topknot and overlong fingernails. The man had managed to shave before meeting the most powerful woman in the empire, but that was all. The samurai prided themselves on bodily perfection, but even by a farmer’s standards, Lord Oda was a disheveled mess.
“Thank you so much for delivering this to me,” Nene said, suffusing her voice with deference and respect. She found men tended to give her what she wanted if she spoke to them in the same way she spoke to the emperor. “I know carrying a letter is far beneath your station.”
In truth that was almost all she knew about him. It was impossible to familiarize herself with all of her husband’s allies; by now his sworn daimyo numbered well over a hundred. Even so, Nene made it her business to memorize everything she could, and in the case of Oda Tomonosuke that was especially easy. The recent tragedies in his life were memorable: his son slain, his wife a suicide, his house destitute. The Odas were distant cousins to Oda Nobunaga, whom Nene audaciously considered a friend. Nobunaga had been the mightiest daimyo the empire had ever known, until that blackheart Akechi Mitsuhide ambushed him, trapped him in a temple, and set it ablaze. Hideyoshi had been swift to avenge Nobunaga. He sent Akechi straight to hell, and with Nene’s help he swiftly eclipsed his predecessor and mentor.
Nobunaga’s great regard for Nene was one of the reasons Hideyoshi took her seriously. Or, put another way, if not for Nobunaga, Nene might have been just another wife. For that, the least Nene owed him was to remember the names of his cousins, even