Heaven's Net Is Wide

5

Isamu’s body was buried first by falling leaves and then by snow and lay undiscovered until the following spring when the village boys began to search the mountains for mushrooms and birds’ eggs. By that time his murderer, his cousin Kotaro, was long back in Inuyama, the clan capital of Iida Sadayoshi and the Tohan, where he ran a business making soybean products, lent money, and behaved much like any other merchant of the city. Kotaro told no one of the precise details, only that the execution had been carried out and Isamu was dead, and he tried to put the whole affair out of his mind with his customary callousness, but at night Isamu’s face floated before his eyes and he was often woken by his cousin’s fearless and incomprehensible laughter. He was tormented by the fact that Isamu had refused to defend himself, had spoken of forgiveness and obedience to some lord. Death had not removed his rival, the traitor; it had made him more powerful-indeed, invincible.

Kotaro had at his command a network of spies, for the Tribe operated throughout the Three Countries, working at this time mainly for the Iida family as they tightened their grip on the East and began to consider how they might expand into the Middle Country and beyond. The Iida family kept a close watch on the Otori, whom they correctly judged to be their main rivals; the clans in the West were less warlike, more prepared to make alliances through marriage. The Middle Country, moreover, was rich, had many silver mines, and controlled fishing and trade in the northern and southern seas. The Otori would not relinquish it lightly.

Kotaro began to make inquiries about the villages that might lie near where he had tracked Isamu down. None was recorded on any map or counted as a source of taxation by any domain. There were many places like this throughout the Three Countries; the Tribe had a few themselves. Two things made Kotaro uneasy. The lingering fear that Isamu might have left a child and the gradual uncovering of something he had known little about: a secret sect who lived unrecognized among the poorest-peasants, outcasts, prostitutes-where people had too hard a struggle of their own to concern themselves overmuch about their neighbors; for this reason the sect members were known as the Hidden.

Kotaro began to gather fragments of information about them, information he was careful to pass on to his contacts among Iida’s warriors, in particular a man called Ando, whose lineage was obscure but who had come to be one of Sadayoshi’s most trusted retainers on account of his cruel tastes and brutal skill with the sword. The two main facts that emerged about the Hidden-that they would take no life, including their own, and that they paid allegiance to an unseen god, greater than any lord-were both serious affronts to the warrior class. It was not hard, through Ando, to inspire Sadayoshi’s son, Sadamu, with hatred for this sect and to initiate the drive to eradicate them.

Kotaro never found the village but he trusted sooner or later Iida Sadamu and his warriors would, and any children Isamu might have left behind would be dealt with.