these rumors were merely a matter of saving face, Shichio wouldn’t bother. Shame might trouble him, but not dishonor. He had no honor to speak of. This was something else.
“He’s competing with someone.” Again he spoke aloud without meaning to. “He must be. He’s lost his monopoly on Hideyoshi’s attention. Now he worries who else Hideyoshi might listen to.”
Aki and Katsushima stopped their squabbling. Daigoro let them watch him in silence while he took a moment to think things through. “Aki, you never saw him with General Mio—”
“Oh, he was that giant fellow, wasn’t he?” She made a nauseated face. “Didn’t you cut his ear off?”
“I did.” In a fair fight, Daigoro thought. We shared a meal together afterward, and toasted each other with sake and whisky. Then Shichio tied him down and cut him to pieces. “You should have seen how the two of them spoke to Hideyoshi. They were yin and yang. Mio sat before him and spoke his mind. Shichio sat to one side and whispered in his ear. Mio spoke from the heart and never shied from the truth. But Shichio . . . I hardly know how to describe it. He doesn’t say what Hideyoshi wants to hear; he makes Hideyoshi want to hear what he’s saying.”
“I remember,” Katsushima said. “It verged on witchcraft.”
“That’s why he thinks nothing of besmirching his name,” Daigoro said. “Whatever ill you say of him, he can twist it, so long as he can whisper into Hideyoshi’s ear. But now there must be someone else whispering, someone whose witchery is strong enough to dispel Shichio’s. He protects his name now because he must. This new advisor . . . I don’t know who he is, but I think there must be someone, and I think he scares Shichio more than I do.”
“Then let us make an ally,” Akiko said. “We have held back our deadliest arrow. I say we let it fly.”
A thrill rippled up Daigoro’s spine. He could see Katsushima felt it too; the ronin’s fist closed tighter around his bow and arrow, as if seizing victory itself. Both of them were eager to loose this shot.
Daigoro knew the true story behind Hideyoshi’s most ignominious defeat. The Battle of Komaki was four years gone, and Hideyoshi had won grand victories since then, but this one rout still loomed large in his memory. He had dared to test his might against Tokugawa Ieyasu, the only other warlord of his stature. Tokugawa had left Mikawa, his beloved homeland, undefended. At Shichio’s urging, Hideyoshi made a bid for it. But a little-known samurai named Okuma Tetsuro anticipated the sally. Hideyoshi’s vanguard thought to pounce on sleeping deer but found a pack of wolves instead. Routed, they sought another way around; it was Shichio’s duty to find a vulnerability. He failed, not because Mikawa was impregnable but because Okuma predicted his movements, captured his scouts, replaced them with men of his own, and sent back false intelligence to Shichio. Shichio fell for the ruse and Hideyoshi ran home with his tail between his legs.
The tale had become one of Daigoro’s favorite stories about his father. That battle was the last time Hideyoshi had taken the field against Tokugawa. Had he carried the day, there was no doubt that Hideyoshi would be not just the empire’s mightiest warlord, but rather its uncontested ruler. If the general who cost him that victory had been samurai, he would have confessed his failure to his lord, then committed seppuku to erase his shame. But Shichio was a craven with no sense of honor. He lied to Hideyoshi from the beginning, and now, four years later, the regent still had not heard the truth. But Daigoro knew the true story, and he wanted nothing more than to write it in a message, tie it to an arrow, and sink that arrow right through Shichio’s heart.
And for that reason, he was suddenly unsure. “Wait,” he said. “Goemon, until now you’ve counseled patience. What changed?”
The bushy-haired ronin nodded with approval. “A good question. You tell me: why did the old abbot on the mountain warn you against telling Hideyoshi the truth straightaway?”
Daigoro closed his eyes, trying to remember it word for word. He liked the abbot of Katto-ji. His bald head and wizened face always made Daigoro think of a sea turtle—an ancient one, a great-grandfather of the ocean, possessed of a buddha’s wisdom. The old man could be as aggravating as a pebble in a boot, but his advice