the garrison sergeant in the harbor pointed up at Mount Daruma and told him the regent would receive him at camp. That sent Shichio into a rage, and the sergeant had a bloody mouth to show for it. But now, for a fleeting moment, he had to admit the landscape was quite beautiful.
Even so, he still wondered whether he ought to turn the procession around and march straight back down to the bay. It was safe by the water. Shichio could have commandeered the harbormaster’s home and set a guard. For that matter, he could have boarded the flagship alone and waited for Hashiba to come to him. Hashiba wouldn’t be pleased, but suffering his wrath was better than feeling the Bear Cub’s sword biting through his flesh. Somehow the whelp still remained unseen. It followed that he could not be traveling by road or by sea, and that only left hiking overland—possibly on a darkening mountain slope just like the north face of Mount Daruma.
Three days earlier, when he’d sat down to tea with Inoue Shigekazu, Shichio had blown and blustered about the Bear Cub, insisting that all the tales of the boy’s prowess were grossly exaggerated. The truth was that even the wildest exaggerations weren’t far from the truth. In the month since his wedding disaster, Shichio had steadily gathered all the facts. There had never been a creeping horde of ninja at the Green Cliff, as he’d told Inoue. Daigoro had no more than one shinobi in his employ. Together, the two of them had overpowered the night watch of a naval frigate—all armed men, trained well in their duties. There hadn’t been any need for the fools to defeat the Bear Cub; they had only to live long enough to sound a horn. But the Bear Cub could move invisibly at will.
An entire warship, stolen. Not a word raised in warning. The same ship broke Shichio’s blockade. Not a single spyglass saw it happen. From there the whelp and his shinobi went on to cut down fifty men at the Green Cliff. Some survivors said the boy’s tattered, gray-haired ronin fought as well. Others swore they watched arrows and musket balls shatter against the boy’s skin. All agreed that “Bear Cub” was the most misleading epithet ever given. “Demon Spawn” was closer to the mark.
And now here was Shichio, surrounded by twenty samurai and whispering to himself, “Only twenty.” When he finally spied Hashiba’s encampment, the sight was like air to a drowning man. He wished he were sitting in a saddle, not a sedan chair. He’d have whipped his horse like a courser in the final stretch, galloping for the safety of camp.
The camp was a series of fabric walls suspended on taut lines from tall poles. Some were white, others red, others gold. All were emblazoned with the kiri blossom of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The longest walls formed large, four-sided enclosures, and at this hour many of them glowed as if foxfires were trapped within. Shichio could smell wood smoke from the cook fires, and got a whiff now and then of succulent pork or sizzling fish. There were the other smells of camp too: horse dung, rice steam, sprays of tansy to ward off mosquitoes.
Hashiba’s enclosure was the largest of them all, closest to the center. By their very nature the long fabric walls tended to form ad hoc roads, and that made the palanquin impractical. Corners were tight, and there would be no straight path to Hashiba’s side. The camp always came into being organically, with no preordained design. Hashiba was in the center because he was always in the center. His high command staked out claims next to his. After that, the various platoons settled in more or less at random. There was no disarray; this was a military encampment, after all. Every corner was a precise right angle and every guy was tied with a perfect tent-line hitch. It was perfectly orderly; there just wasn’t any logic to it. But there would be no Bear Cub here, so Shichio stepped out of his palanquin and into the cooler evening air.
He wended his way through the maze, greeting officers when he recognized them and paying the common men no mind. Hashiba’s enclosure was at least ten jo on a side, large enough to practice mounted archery—which was precisely what Hashiba had been up to, judging by the wide rings of hoofprints and the target posts at their center. There wasn’t a drop