Free Brilliance of the Moon by Lian Hearn

his sons and grandsons. Now he had
lost the first and would never see the second. His sons had not even, in his
mind, died with honor on the battlefield, but had been murdered shamefully by a
creature who was barely human.
    “I don’t understand how you overcame him,” he said, sizing me up with
a look that verged on scornful. “No offense, but both my sons were twice your
size, older, more experienced.” He drank deeply, then went on: “But then, I
could never understand how you killed Iida, either. There was that rumor about
you after you disappeared, of some strange blood in you that gave you special powers.
Is it a sort of sorcery?”
    I was aware of Kahei tensing beside me. Like any warrior he took
immediate offense at the suggestion of sorcery. I did not think Niwa was being
deliberately insulting; I thought he was too dulled by grief to know what he
was saying. I made no reply. He continued to study me, but I did not meet his
gaze. I was starting to long for sleep; my eyelids were quivering, my teeth
aching.
    “There were a lot of rumors,” Niwa went on. “Your disappearance
was a considerable blow to Arai. He took it very personally. He thought there
was some conspiracy against him. He had a long-term mistress: Muto Shizuka. You
know her?”
    “She was a maid to my wife,” I replied, not mentioning that she
was also my cousin. “Lord Arai himself sent her.”
    “She turned out to be from the Tribe. Well, he’d known that all
along, but he hadn’t realized what it meant. When you went off, apparently to
join the Tribe—or so everyone was saying—it brought a lot of things to a head.“
    He broke off, his gaze becoming more suspicious. “But you
presumably know all this already.”
    “I heard that Lord Arai intended to move against the Tribe,” I
said carefully. “But I have not heard of the outcome.”
    “Not very successful. Some of his retainers—I was not among
them—advised him to work with the Tribe as Iida did. Their opinion was that the
best way to control them was to pay them. Arai didn’t like that: He couldn’t
afford
it
for a start, and it’s not in his
nature. He wants things to be cut-and-dried and he can’t stand to be made a
fool of. He thought Muto Shizuka, the Tribe, even you, had hoodwinked him in
some way.“
    “That was never my intention,” I said. “But I can see how my
actions must have looked to him. I owe him an apology. As soon as we are
settled at Maruyama I will go to him. Is he at Inuyama now?”
    “He spent the winter there. He intended to return to Kumamoto and mop up the last remnants of resistance there, move eastward to consolidate
the former Noguchi lands, and then pursue his campaign against the Tribe,
starting in Inuyama.” He poured more wine for us all and gulped a cupful down.
“But it’s like trying to dig up a sweet potato: There’s far more underground
than you think, and no matter how carefully you try to lift it, pieces break
off and begin to put out shoots again. I flushed out some members here; one of
them ran the brewery, the other was a small-scale merchant and moneylender. But
all I got were a couple of old men, figureheads, no more. They took poison
before I could get anything out of them. The rest disappeared.”
    He lifted the wine cup and stared morosely at it. “It’s going to
split Arai in two,” he‘ said finally. “He can handle the Tohan; they’re a
simple enemy, straightforward, and the heart mostly went out of them with
Iida’s death. But trying to eradicate this hidden enemy at the same time—he’s
set himself an impossible task, and he’s running out of money and resources.”
He seemed to catch what he was saying and went on quickly: “Not that I’m
disloyal to him. I gave him my allegiance and I’ll stand by that. It’s cost me
my sons, though.”
    We all bowed our heads and murmured our sympathy.
    Kahei said, “It’s getting late. We should sleep a little if we
are to march again at dawn.”
    “Of