He wonders whether Orito is already pregnant.

I will care for her, he swears, and raise the child as my own.

Silver birches shiver. Whatever she wishes is all that matters.

‘What was it like,’ Uzaemon asks a question he never asked Shuzai before ‘the first time you killed a man?’ Sycamore roots grip a steep bank. Shuzai leads for another ten, twenty, thirty paces, until the path arrives at a wide and lapping pool. Shuzai checks the steep, surrounding terrain, as if for ambushers…

… and cocks his head like a dog. He hears something Uzaemon does not.

The swordsman’s half-smile says, One of ours. ‘Killing depends on circumstances, as you’d expect, whether it’s a cold, planned murder, or a hot death in a fight, or inspired by honour or a more shameful motive. However many times you kill, though, it’s the first that matters. It’s a man’s first blood that banishes him from the world of the ordinary.’ Shuzai kneels at the water’s edge and drinks water from his cupped hands. A feathery fish hovers in the current; a bright berry floats by. ‘That reckless lordling of Iyo I told you about?’ Shuzai climbs on to a rock. ‘I was sixteen and sworn to serve the greedy dolt. The feud’s history is too long to explain here, but my role in it had me blundering through a thicket on the flank of Mount Ishizuchi one stewed night in the Sixth Month, separated from my comrades. The frogs’ racket smothered other sound and the darkness was blinding, and suddenly the ground gave way and I fell into an enemy foxhole. The scout was as unprepared as I was, and the foxhole so stuffed with our two bodies that neither of us could reach our swords. We fumbled and writhed but neither of us yelled for help. His hands found my throat, and clamped and squeezed, tight as Death. My mind was red and shrieking and my throat was crumpling and I thought, This is it… but Fate disagreed. Long ago, Fate had chosen for the enemy lord’s crest a crescent moon. This insignia was attached to my strangler’s helmet so poorly that it snapped off in my hand, so I could slip its sharp metal point through the slit of his eye-mask, through the softness behind it and side to side like a knife in a yam until his grip on my windpipe weakened and fell away.’

Uzaemon washes his hands and drinks some water from the pool.

‘Afterwards,’ says Shuzai, ‘in marketplaces, cities, crossroads, hamlets…’

The icy water strikes Uzaemon’s jawbone like a Dutch tuning fork.

‘… I thought, I am in this world, but no longer of this world.’

A wildcat paces along the bough of a fallen elm, bridging the path.

‘This lack of belonging, it marks us…’ Shuzai frowns ‘… around the eyes.’

The wildcat looks at the men unafraid, and yawns.

It leaps down to a rock, laps water, and disappears.

‘Some nights,’ Shuzai says, ‘I wake to find his fingers choking me.’

Uzaemon is hiding in a deep, weather-sculpted crater, like a molar’s indentation, a wiry-rooted scramble above the track, with the two mercenaries going by the names Kenka and Muguchi. Kenka is a lithe man of many small and fluid motions, whilst Muguchi is a stockier, cut-lipped miser of words. From their crater, the men have a partial view of the Halfway Gatehouse, just an arrow-shot away. Smoke blows down from the structure’s crude vent. Uphill, upwind and above the bluff, Shuzai and four of the men are waiting for the guards to change. Across the river, something tears through the wood.

‘Wild boar,’ mutters Kenka. ‘Sounds like a fat old thumper.’

They hear a shadowy far-off bell that must belong to the Shrine of Mount Shiranui.

As improbable as a theatrical backdrop, Bare Peak hangs in the sky under clouds massy and crumpling.

‘Rain’d be useful,’ remarks Kenka, ‘so long as it waits till we’re done: it’d wipe our tracks, swell the rivers, make the roads worse for horses and-’

‘Voices?’ Muguchi’s hand demands quiet. ‘Listen – three men…’

Uzaemon hears nothing for a minute or more, until the embittered voice on the track below is very near. ‘Before we was married, she was “No, after we’re married I’m yours but not till then,” but since the wedding she’s all “No, I ain’t in the mood so paws off.” All I did was knock sense into her, like any husband would, but since then the demon in the blacksmith’s wife jumped into mine an’ now she won’t look at me. Can’t even divorce the she-viper, for fear her uncle’d take back his boat an’ then where’d I be?’

‘High an’ dry,’ says a second companion, passing below. ‘That’s where.’

The three approach the gates. ‘Open up, Buntarô,’ one calls out. ‘It’s us.’

‘Oh, it’s “us” is it?’ The shout is muffled. ‘An’ who might this “us” be?’

‘Ichirô, Ubei and Tôsui,’ answers one, ‘and Ichirô’s moanin’ ’bout his wife.’

‘We can find room for the first three, but leave the last outside.’

Ten minutes later, the three off-duty guards emerge. ‘So, Buntarô,’ says one, as they draw into earshot. ‘Serve us up the juicy bits.’

‘Those’re ’tween me, Ichirô’s wife and his tell-no-lies futon.’

‘Tight as a turtle’s slit you are, you…’ The voices fade away.

Uzaemon, Kenka and Muguchi watch the gate, wait and listen.

Minute follows minute follows minute follows minute…

There is no sunset, just a steady fading of the light.

Something’s gone wrong, Fear hisses inside Uzaemon.

Muguchi announces, ‘Done.’ One of the gatehouse gates swings open. A form appears and waves a hand. By the time Uzaemon has scrambled down to the track, the other men are halfway to the gatehouse. Waiting for the interpreter at the gate is Kenka, who whispers, ‘Don’t speak.’ Inside, Uzaemon finds a sheltered porch and a long room built on props and stilts over the river. There is a rack for pikes and axes, an upended cooking pot, a smouldering fire and three large sacks, suspended by ropes from a rafter. First one and then another of the sacks moves, and a bulge shifts, betraying an elbow or knee. The nearest sack, however, hangs motionless as a bag of stones.

Bara is wiping a throwing-knife on a bloodied rag…

The river flowing underneath clamours with human syllables.

Your sword didn’t kill him, Uzaemon thinks, but your presence here did.

Shuzai leads Uzaemon up through the rear gates. ‘We told them we meant them no harm. We told them nobody need be hurt. We said that although samurai cannot surrender, farmers and fishermen can. They agreed to be gagged and bound, but one tried to outwit us. There’s a trapdoor in the corner, over the river, and he made a lunge for it. He almost reached it, and had he escaped, things would have gone badly for us. Bara’s throwing-knife opened his throat and Tsuru only just saved the body from being washed down to Kurozane.’

Is Ichiro’s wife, Uzaemon wonders, now both adulteress and widow?

‘He didn’t suffer.’ Shuzai grips his arm. ‘He was dead within seconds.’

By night, Mekura Gorge becomes a primordial place. The twelve-strong raiding party walks in single file. The track now rises above the river, clinging to the steep side of the gorge. The aches and creaks of beeches and oaks give way to heavy-breathing evergreens. Shuzai has chosen a moonless night, but the clouds are disintegrating, and the starlight is bright enough to gild the darkness.

He didn’t suffer, Uzaemon thinks. He was dead within seconds.

He places one sore foot in front of the other and tries not to think.

A quiet life of schoolmastering, Uzaemon sees a future, in a quiet town…

He places one sore foot in front of the other and tries not to think.

Maybe a quiet life was all the slain guard wanted as well…

His earlier zeal to take part in the raid on the monastery has disappeared.

His mind’s mind shows him the scene of Bara wiping his knife on the bloodied cloth, over and over, until at last the men arrive at Todoroki Bridge.