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As the cold moon rose, the encampment sank into a restless sleep.
Under the stars, Magoichi lay awake, the earth so close to his cheek it filled his nose with the sharp smell of damp soil. Unlike the expense of a day’s march on foot, horse riding left him stiff and sore but lacking any real exhaustion. He had trained his body so: to not encourage sloth, to not sleep until the mind decreed its inevitable surrender to the body. Under rifles’ fire, it might be the difference between this side of the world and the other.
The cold settled like a ghost over him, keeping his mind awake and painfully alert. Face turned to one side, his gaze lingered unseeing at a pair of brightly burning torches that illuminated huddled figures. Occasional wind blowing down the mountain ridge made them shiver, shift, seeking warmth from comrades and the unfeeling earth both—but overall, the calm did not stir.
It would be a long night.
Magoichi rose with lumbered grace, coaxing strained muscles first to stretch, then to walk. The cold followed his slow meandering like a cloak and his scant armour rattled with each movement. Few of the men noticed his progress, their faces darkened by night, hooded eyes glancing up only to confirm friend from foe. A pair of guards sitting apart from the rest of the group nodded their heads, a greeting not to him but the advent of sleep. Only when a horse neighed, disturbed by his slow-moving progress, that they jerked awake, looking around with wild, hazy eyes.
He waved a casual hand at them and trudged up a path fringed by long-limbed trees. Masamune slept separately from his men, in a tent set up somewhere out of the way. It had always struck Magoichi as an odd decision, even unwise; this was not the common practice in battles, and Masamune was neither an emperor nor a shogun who could afford to waste a company of soldiers for the separate duty of guarding his tent. An encampment should be established sensibly, to offer enough protection to all, men and lord alike.
Magoichi paused halfway, and for a moment considered turning back. A single torch stood at the end of the path, where the tent was situated, and two of the very few men trusted enough by Masamune with that proximity were standing on guard. The vulnerability of the location made Magoichi cringe. His guerrilla mind retained the habit of contriving ways to win a battle before it was necessarily fought—and this setting offered him plenty. A fire attack, easily done with little preparation and perhaps some luck in timing. Or a small group of assassins slipping their way through under the convenient camouflage of the surrounding forest.
But these men knew it too. The fact that they were awake proved that they were alert. Magoichi recognised them both—Sadakiyo and Saburou, brothers, long in service of the Date Clan—and as he approached, Sadakiyo watched him with wary eyes. Trust could not be bred in a matter of months and Magoichi knew enough of his place as a recent addition in the army. He nodded in greeting, opening his mouth to ask if their lord was still awake.
In the close shroud of the forest, the scream coming suddenly from inside the tent made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end.
Magoichi was the first to react, deftly evading Sadakiyo’s hand which had reached out to stop him purely by reflex. Inside the small tent, Masamune was sitting on his makeshift bed and Magoichi suddenly found himself at gunpoint. He froze, pinned by a pair of black muzzles and a wild eye.
“Damn it, Saika, I could have shot you!”
Masamune lowered both weapons. A proof of recognition though it was, Magoichi only breathed a little easier. For the first time he noticed the candle, burning low on the dirt floor at the other side of the tent. The soft glow allowed him a scrutiny of Masamune’s hands, one white-knuckled fist and the other a claw, quivering uncontrollably in the mass of dark hair; then the look in his eyes, the fury and mortification, and far back, the residue of his dark dreams. With the same aggressiveness in his voice, Masamune addressed his men who still stood mutely at the tent’s entrance.
“Why is he in here?”
Saburou looked ready to argue, but it was Sadakiyo who answered, “It was our fault, Masamune-sama. Should we escort him out now?”
“If I’m not wanted, I can leave.” Magoichi turned around and left the tent before Masamune could rise to challenge his presence even further. His own indignation bubbled close to the surface, thickly clouded by discomfiture at intruding a moment anyone would obviously consider private. It was not until he had reached the end of his long way back to the camp that he was reminded once more to the distance, and the peculiarity of it.
Magoichi thought he had his answer now.
–
“It’s Magoichi.”
Masamune appeared unhearing, lost in the dull rhythm of horseshoes and weary, dragging feet. His helm cast a shadow across his face, away from the sun’s glare. He only looked up when Magoichi drew their horse level—or at least tried to, except the breadth of the mountain path proved anything but accommodating.
“What?”
“It’s Magoichi,” he repeated, slowly, as if talking to a dull-witted child. “Not Saika.”
The increasingly familiar sneer appeared on Masamune’s face without missing a beat. “What are you? My pal?”
“Your pal is your head,” Magoichi said by way of an advice, ignoring the barb, “and your guns. Trust them when you cannot trust anyone else.”
“I know that, Saika.”
Magoichi did not smile. Petulance only amused him when he was in a good mood, and Saika was a village he had lost, a family he had failed. If Masamune was haunted by ghosts from the past in his sleep, then Magoichi was dreaming awake, with every inhaled air and silent beat.
“You want me to follow you to a battlefield and yet you can’t even trust me?”
“Wrong.” Masamune’s voice was curt, decisive. “It’s you who wants to follow me, so you should trust me.”
He’s just a boy, Magoichi had told himself hundreds of times, with varying degrees of successes. Youth could excuse pride, even arrogance without a cause. For all he knew, Masamune’s show of brazenness was no more than the sound of cannons designed to obscure cries of a more humane nature, perhaps even the terrified whimpers of a child.
This new display of petulance only convinced him that neither of them had forgotten about the night before.
“It doesn’t work that way,” he said with a frown. “Trust is given and received both with equal measure, or no relationship will ever succeed.”
Masamune looked at him long and hard, in his eyes the sort of viciousness familiar only in battlefields. “But if you already question me now, then do you really have any to begin with, let alone to give?”
Magoichi laughed then, more out of surprise than genuine amusement; he hadn’t expected that kind of wordplay. “Fair enough.”
“Good,” Masamune returned his attention to the winding road ahead, his smirk triumphant.
–
Very few retainers could boast ample knowledge of their masters. Magoichi was a hired hand, and had no wish to possess any knowledge concerning his employers more than what would keep him alive—and paid. His loyalty only went as far as the amount of gold that trickled into his pockets, and so far he found no reason to change his principles.
For someone who bared his ambition to the world, Masamune revealed very little of himself. Whether this was done consciously or not was up to anybody’s guess. He barked orders, dished out insults, and bullied new soldiers to such extent that those who stayed had stayed either because they had no other choice, or their hearts truly followed him. And an army compiled of faithful and desperate men stopped at nothing.
To say that Magoichi knew the young lord was an overstatement in so many ways. What he knew was what he saw—but in battles he could see much. For one, Masamune fought with the grace of a winged dragon, with pride and arrogance boasted as clearly as the crescent moon which embellished his helmet. A pair of loyal weapons was on each side of his hips, set at equal heights, and still he wielded his sword better than his gun. The latter served no practical purpose but that of intimidation, for even men of superior courage would falter at the sight of a weapon faster than their blades, capable of greater damage once given the slightest opportunity.
But Masamune’s aim was careless, designed to frighten instead of hitting its mark. The first time Magoichi saw how he fought—brusque movements of a blood-stained sword, the haphazard shower of bullets, haughty insults thrown about freely—he had thought the man mad. And yet he claimed his enemies easily, fast forcing them into submission in a very few count of minutes, hours for the entire legion. His strategy, if such existed, consisted of speed and a lot of noise, with an element of surprise sprinkled in between.
And it worked.
Cries of victory were quick to dampen the enemy soldiers’ spirit. Masamune sat high atop his horse, a boy-king revelling in conquest and blood spilled, caring none for slain comrades or lives lost. It was this contrast which had Magoichi staring, and in return Masamune grinned, sharper than the tang of blood in his mouth.
What neither of them expected was a surprise retaliation at the height of their delight. It was too easily forgotten, that triumph and defeat shifted as quickly as the turn of ocean's tides. In a mere count of heartbeats, the table was turned, tall banners of the Date clan overshadowed by dark lines of horses charging down from a hilltop, bearing the red of the opposing army. Masamune’s grin disappeared upon the sight, but he looked at Magoichi and the fire in his eyes blazed instead.
“Time to show what you’re capable of, mercenary.”
Magoichi’s only response was a grim smile before his rifle marked the first horse down.
–
“If you had listened–”
“But Masamune-sama–”
“If you had listened to my order,” Masamune’s voice rose above the heated protests of his generals, “we wouldn’t have lost! If you all had fought instead of running into the forest like a bunch of cowards, we would have stood proudly above our enemy’s corpses!”
Only one man dared speak in the stony silence following Masamune’s outburst, an old general with grey beard smeared with dried blood and a weathered face chiselled by experience. “Need I remind you, Masamune-sama,” he said calmly, “that it was your decision to initiate this attack?”
Masamune’s face turned into an unnatural shade of red. Before all hell broke loose, Magoichi had slipped out and put a healthy distance between the main tent and his ears. A strategy meeting suited him ill and if it would escalate into a verbal brawl, then he would do well to clear off before getting involved. In any case, his presence would not be missed by the bickering generals.
One battle did not win a war, but the aftertaste of defeat was bitter no matter what. He thought he had gotten used to it—he should have—but perhaps there was simply no getting used to defeat. Like a cut into the flesh, it would still be painful the hundredth time around.
Maybe it was this new army. It lent him a purpose, even one as shallow as lusting for victory. When Magoichi raised his head and looked around, he was no longer staring at the blurred faces of dead comrades or the lengthy shadows of strangers once met then forgotten. His eyes saw and his mind recognised.
The sun had just risen, a streak of gold behind tall, distant peaks. The field by the river was filled with wounded soldiers, their bedding no more than yellow patches of dry grass and a layer of dirt. Magoichi grimaced. There was nothing quite as different as the two realities, leaders and soldiers, one group busily shifting blames while the other too drowned in their effort to keep their limbs attached—or their lives for that matter.
Magoichi knelt down and began to make himself useful for the wounded.
–
On the second night of their retreat, Masamune’s tent still stood apart from the rest.
After two waves of pursuers and an entire day without respite, Magoichi had assumed that even nightmares would at least take a break. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps Masamune was no different from him. It was not battles which birthed nightmares; they came from within, only triggered awake by the smell of blood and decay.
There was no escaping this sort of ghosts.
Between one battle and another, nights sped past like demons, too fast in the shadow of weariness, too easily disturbed. His own rest came not in the shape of deep sleep. Magoichi contented himself by sitting among the wounded, watching the night unfurl and deepen, sometimes cracking a joke or two to lighten the mood. A smattering of laughter, often blood-roughened, always quickly followed his attempts as if they were afraid of silence. Their current landscape was one with beauty that came with nightfall, a beauty that haunted and spellbound while fireflies feasted on weary, trampled souls.
He was at the beginning of another joke when Saburou located him amidst the masses, a flaming torch in hand.
“Masamune-sama asks for your presence, sir.”
Magoichi could feel the eyes of the men on him, now almost wary with suspicion and anticipation. A moment ago, he had been a part of them; now they remembered that he was, in fact, different—that he wielded the power to decide. Saying nothing, Magoichi rose to his feet and left.
Masamune was sitting on the floor of his tent when he came in. The interior was lit by a pair of candles and a sharp, familiar smell filled the close space. At Magoichi’s arrival, he looked up from the disassembled pieces of his twin pistols.
“Sit,” he said shortly, fingers barely slowing down as they moved from piece to piece with practiced ease. The One-eyed Dragon’s face was shadowed by the same weariness that haunted the rest of his men, and yet his voice betrayed none of it.
“We’ll strike back tomorrow.” The announcement came abruptly, carelessly. “I have enough of us running with our tails between our legs.”
In response, Magoichi allowed himself a few moments of silence, mainly to let the words sink in and common sense emerge. This would not be the first time that he had to put a stop to Masamune’s endless stream of less-than-prudent ideas—and he could not imagine it would be his last either.
“The men are not ready.”
“Will they ever be?” Masamune shot back, but without a sneer; instead, he looked solemn, almost melancholy as they held each other’s gaze without blinking. “Tell me, Saika. You were out there with them the whole day. Will they ever be ready?”
Magoichi offered a humourless smile. “Not after the sort of defeat we had yesterday,” he conceded the line of reasoning.
“Exactly.” Masamune slapped his knee, wasting no time to pounce on the point. “And that’s why we must attack. It’s not about retaliation—it’s about surprise. If we can use this chance to hit them hard, they’ll be crippled long enough until the Toyotomi Army arrives.”
“And let them deliver the last blow? That’s very generous.”
The familiar glint returned into Masamune’s eyes, dark in candlelight. “Not if it’s up to me.”
Magoichi laughed not because it was appropriate to laugh in their current situation, but precisely because it was not. Men like Masamune could not be hurt by things proper and rule-bound; he was living above all those.
“You’re absolutely insane.”
Masamune bared his teeth. “What’s the point of being sane if I cannot win?”
“True enough,” Magoichi sighed, closing his eyes for a moment. “This whole war is insane enough as it is. How did you get the old men to agree with this plan anyway?”
“I didn’t,” Masamune answered, almost gleefully, “and that’s where your role comes in.”
The fact that he was not surprised at all hardly bothered Magoichi. He had known, from the moment Saburou approached, that it would come to this. “I’m going to regret this, ain’t I?”
Masamune was grinning. “Only if you’re sane and stupid both.”
–
Of all twenty men Magoichi had chosen, none was too pleased with this role they suddenly found themselves thrust into in the middle of the night. The only consolation for them was the weather. A heavy rain would provide an excellent cover for a sneak party, despite the cold and discomfort it would no doubt cause.
Masamune only laughed when he told him this, but to say that he had no regard for his followers would be a judgment in error, made at the first flush of acquaintance instead after a long, careful observation. The man was a military genius, capable of many great things; he could not be measured in one glance. In any case, Magoichi must admit that he liked a man who could devise—and then build up the necessary guts to execute—a strategy not only as daring, but also as reckless as this one he was about to lead.
“Be as loud as possible,” Masamune kept saying, the continuous twitching of his fingers the only testimony to his disquiet. Without his trademark helm, he looked even younger than his real age.
Magoichi, deprived of sleep and in no mood at all to humour anyone but himself, clung desperately to the final straws of his patience. “So you have said for at least fifty times,” he nearly snapped. “Any more last advice before I go forth and cast the last of my sanity?”
Masamune smirked. “Succeed.”
“That’s a must, not an advice.”
“Let’s have yours then.”
Magoichi grinned, not nearly as sharp, but it was the best he could manage at the moment. “Your aim sucks,” he said promptly, entirely without remorse, “so please, for the sake of your army, keep the shooting at minimum.”
“My aim does not suck.” Was Masamune pouting or his eyes had finally given way to fatigue-fed illusions?
“But it does,” Magoichi murmured, shaking his head in a mockery of despair. “I’m giving you shooting lessons once this is all over. Guns are not all about big bangs. There are certain philosophies–”
It only took one shot from Masamune’s pistol to send him running—with an even wider grin.
–
In the end, no one was really surprised when they had won with little more than blind courage and twenty-or-so men charging from behind the enemy lines, making a great racket with horses and war drums and guns. Not even the old, conservative generals, Magoichi noticed, so much as blinked when news of their enemy’s chaotic retreat reached their ears. When all was said and done, a victory was a victory and what manner of strategy they had used barely put a stain on the glorious tapestry.
Masamune celebrated like any other man: in excess. Victories had all the sweet and bitter of sake, like life and death, festivities and mourning, the duality tailing the end of any battle. His visible eye glazed and he laughed and sang in the small, cramped tent. For battle-torn men, to drink was to celebrate as much as to forget.
What Masamune probably did not remember, to drink was also to be careless, to let shields unravel under a spell of intoxication. The lack of cold, fresh air in the tent also thickened the haze over their eyes, dulling shapes and colours of things.
“They keep coming back,” he had been repeating a variation of the same sentence over and over. Magoichi had kept silent so far out of curiosity. He knew about Masamune’s history—at least, as much as the next person in the street. And if even half of those stories were true, then every time he heard a scream in the night, he simply had to pick one out of the many possible sources of nightmares that seemed to litter Masamune’s life.
“I’ve tried to forget,” the young lord spoke again, a touch of sadness in the breadth of his voice but no more than that. “Hundreds of times. They don’t let me.”
Even at the height of inebriation, Masamune did not whine. He spoke them as cold, hard facts, and it was this strange impression which finally moved Magoichi to words. “We all have our demons.”
A drunken semblance of annoyance passed over Masamune’s face. “Save your preaching, Saika.”
Magoichi smiled wryly, eyes closed to keep shapes and thoughts intact behind his eyelids instead of fraying between shafts of light. He remembered Masamune’s strut before the men when they had cheered, throat dry from dust and triumph’s cries, and then his reticence to celebrate with them beyond a few congratulatory cups. He was still a boy; his title—and the height of his horse—were often the only two things which separated him from boys of his age, the bullies or the bullied living in the streets of any town.
“I said,” Magoichi spoke again, louder, “we all have our demons.”
There was a precarious pause, and then Masamune spat, “At least you’re not… plagued by them.”
Magoichi stared at the distorted reflection his face made in his half-empty cup. The swaying surface made a curious effect and he almost looked like someone he had known from childhood, a face in the gloom of a winter evening. “I am,” he said meditatively. “Every waking moment.”
Masamune sneered. “Impossible. There’s no way you could...”
The silence rapped sharp when Masamune refused to continue speaking. He was looking at the rug under his feet, his expression unreadable—as if there was a sudden sense of kinship which always blighted the unfortunates and made them flock together. Magoichi smiled; most likely, it was only the work of the drink.
“You just have to endure,” he answered the half-accusation. “There’s no going around these things—they don’t go away.”
“I know that.”
“Really.”
Masamune gave him a dark look. “You’re pretty mouthy, aren’t you,”
“Part of the charm.” Magoichi grinned and poured more sake into his cup. They toasted both hard-earned victory and glorious death, and drank to forget.
Neither of them woke up until noon.
–
The first thing that struck him about Oushuu in winter was its lack of colour. Small clusters of brown and black sprinkled the white landscape, but even those were meek, muted by the thick blanket of snow. In the distance, mountains rose as if painted, out of mist-laced dreams.
Magoichi roamed the streets and got his shoes dirty with mud and slush, and felt so utterly alive. Almost no one paid any particular attention to him, too busy going about their own business beneath woven straw hats and tightly-drawn cloaks. The women here reminded him of those in his old village; they were fiercer, braver than regular city womenfolk, their voices rising higher and louder amidst the humdrum of everyday’s life. These women hardly needed brightly-coloured garments to make their presence known, and some of them were even daring enough to return his appreciative glances with little more than giggles behind a white hand. Their laughter sprung free and he was grinning in return, grateful to be there.
For all his military acumen, Magoichi knew he did not belong in battlefields. Knowledge and skill had nothing to do with affinity in this case. He had known everything that was to know about rifles after his first sixteen summers, had learnt to lead a company far before that, had learnt to kill soon after that—and still he knew warfare was not for him. Beauty was more in his line. Female beauty, nature’s charm, the simplicity of a bottle of sake under a blooming sakura tree, even Oushuu’s wintry silence.
Masamune must have some of that appeal too, Magoichi reflected wryly, or he would not be here, trudging this snow-layered land and waiting for the young lord to appear.
He had not seen Masamune since their arrival. That, in itself, would not have been disconcerting if not for the manner of their parting. Harsh words were no stranger to Magoichi, but true accusations had stung deep even as he hid behind an offhand smirk. He was Hideyoshi’s pawn; it was a fact and Masamune knew it.
What Magoichi was less sure about was whether he was still one. Pawns held but one allegiance; right now, Magoichi could not answer where his lay.
“So troublesome.”
Sighing, he turned around and walked slowly back to the castle.
–
When they did meet, it was a meeting by chance, unexpected and entirely unscripted.
The full moon hung low in the sky when Magoichi emerged from his room, weary of chasing that winged illusion called sleep. Still unused to the cold, he walked swiftly, if aimlessly. The castle grounds proved an eerily beautiful setting for a night prowl; cast in half lights and soft shadows, it looked very different from its daylight face, almost outlandish.
It was not until he had reached the south portion of the grounds that Magoichi found a purpose to this stroll. A distant echo of something unsettlingly familiar reached his ears—repeatedly. As he drew closer, it grew louder, a discordant sound shattering the night’s tranquillity, again and again.
He soon found the source of the disturbance. The sight of Masamune aiming his pistol at a target practice eighty paces away, in the middle of the night, brought a smirk to Magoichi’s lips.
“Don’t raise your elbow too high.”
The young lord swung around so fast that balance nearly deserted him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Magoichi ignored the question. “It’s all about balance,” he said instead, footfalls soundless across snow-draped ground. “You have to feel it in your arm.”
Masamune’s lips tightened into a firm line, but the pistol rose, once more seeking the bright red wooden plank which made its target, hung from a bough of a barren tree. At Magoichi’s nod, he fired.
The redness remained untouched.
Magoichi felt a frown gathering on his brow. “Maybe it’s your eye.”
“Because I have only one instead of a pair?”
“More or less. But speaking strictly about shooting, it should have been an advantage. One eye means one focus, and one focus is always better.”
He stepped behind Masamune and touched the side of the younger man’s arm, feeling taut muscles rippling underneath. “It’s all about balance in the end. I have two eyes, so you must find your own. If you aim to the left a bit–”
A gentle squeeze provoked a second fire. The bullet grazed the upper right corner of the target and sent it swinging wildly back and forth. Magoichi grinned. “That was better. But you still aimed too high.”
“Of course I aim high.” Masamune tilted his head and pinned a rebellious eye on him. “I aim for victory.”
“It may be your victory,” Magoichi nodded, stepping away, “and it’s certainly your army—but an army is made of people, soldiers and civilians alike, and they won’t always be your people if you can’t even shoot straight.”
He fully expected a lash, or perhaps a shot from Masamune’s poised weapon. The One-eyed Dragon scowled, but the pistol was sheathed back into its holster. “It’s too dark, I can’t exactly see,” he muttered. “We’ll pick this up in the morning.”
For a moment, Magoichi had a mind to inquire after the reason of this nocturnal practice, but then decided it was none of his business. “Tomorrow?” he asked instead.
“What do you think?”
He ignored both sneer and sarcasm. “Does this mean we’re good?” he pursued, eyes intent on the younger man.
Masamune arched an eyebrow; amusement quirked the corners of his lips, but the result was not wholly pleasant. “You’re a useful and competent soldier, Magoichi,” he drawled, voice low, bordering dangerous. “I’ll give you that at least. But trust—real trust—goes beyond usefulness or competence.”
“As does loyalty.”
Masamune smirked; in the moon’s silvery light, his expression was a mirror of a wild beast’s feral grin. “As does loyalty,” he agreed, turning around to head back to the castle.
–
As it turned out, all it took was a few flashy demonstrations and some well-placed pointers.
Magoichi watched as the twin pistols roared, spitting bullets that sliced the air, guided by precision. There were eight different targets, each with a different colour. Masamune sought the darkest first, an old black helm, and from this worked his way in little increments, steadily going lighter and lighter. The last was a bright yellow board painted like a grimacing face; the bullet found its exact centre.
Magoichi only nodded an appreciation in the face of the younger man’s grinning triumph. Barely two weeks had elapsed since they had begun their training regime. Masamune might be extremely difficult and incorrigibly childish at times, but he was a fast learner. A few more months of regular practice and he would be a demon raining bullets in the battlefield.
But then his grin faltered, his excitement dimmed. Now he stared at his guns as if they were a pair of snakes.
“If only I can shoot at ghosts with these.”
Magoichi kept his countenance neutral, out of surprise’s swift reach. “I’m afraid such purpose goes beyond any level of marksmanship,” he intoned solemnly.
“Even yours?”
“Even mine.”
“Then how do you continue living with those ghosts?” Masamune held his gaze, openly searching. Suddenly Magoichi realised that this was the first time any of them had tried to breach the subject in a fairly sober state.
“There are ways,” he tried a noncommittal answer.
Masamune’s eyes hardened. “What ways?”
“It depends.” A few seconds elapsed as Magoichi measured the young man standing in front of him. A smile quivered on his lips. “For example, have you tried a woman?”
“A woman.” A look of utter bewilderment made a brief appearance, replaced just as quickly by a colour so unnatural it could suggest a million things. “That’s your advice—a woman?”
“What I meant to say was,” Magoichi maintained a scrupulously correct tone, “keep your body satisfied and then maybe the nightmares will stay away.”
The colour suffusing Masamune’s face deepened into a decidedly unhealthy hue. Magoichi momentarily wondered if escape was in order, in case the younger man decided to make him the new target practice.
“It didn’t work.” The confession was faint, nigh inaudible while the speaker steadfastly refused to look at him.
Magoichi nearly choked on his own snort of laughter; only a finely-honed instinct for self-preservation prevented the full of birth of it. “It didn’t?” His voice, remarkably, betrayed none of his exertion. “How curious. Then what about a man?”
One of the trembling pistols exploded. The bullet missed his neck by a finger’s breadth, a flash of heat and gunpowder. Magoichi blinked, and then brandished a wide, unrepentant grin, as he always did before the gates of hell.
“Don’t you dare smile,” Masamune snarled.
Magoichi wisely ignored the outburst. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why this is such a big deal. Maybe you’re afraid of what people are saying, but it’s ridiculous. That a man is having nightmares doesn’t exactly indicate that he is immature or incapable in any way.”
“It’s damned embarrassing!”
“Well,” Magoichi deliberated, a slow-stretching smirk across his lips, “I suppose,”
Without further wait, the second pistol echoed its twin.
---
Meeting Hideyoshi nowadays had a touch of ritualism about it.
For one, the man was no longer a minor warlord. Magoichi found himself dressing up for the occasion, and while he could not help but appreciate the cold caress of silk on his roughened skin, a heavy, oppressive set of consequences weighed his shoulders down as he walked through dark, meandering hallways, following a wordless, silent-footed castle official.
And then came the long, tiring wait. Magoichi watched the line of petitioners, each dressed in their best silks and brocades, each hiding a specific supplication behind a mask of practiced indifference. Hideyoshi’s rule was by no means secure, but he was currently the most powerful man in the land—and for the moment, it was all that mattered.
The most powerful man in the land was seated on a dais when Magoichi entered the inner hall. He walked the length of polished wood, painfully conscious of those narrow eyes watching him wordlessly. For a man of a relatively small stature, Hideyoshi had a curiously humbling effect on most people. In a world where ancestry mattered more than personal worth, he challenged these deep-rooted traditions with little more than sheer bravado and clear-sighted ambitions.
Magoichi halted about ten paces away from the dais and lowered himself to a sitting position. Both palms flat on the cool wooden floor, he bowed respectfully. “Lord Hideyoshi.”
A grin split the leathery tan of Hideyoshi’s face. “So how are you, old friend?”
To Magoichi’s relief, it was only too easy for him to fall back into old patterns, as if a span of eight months and two major battles had not weakened the cord of their friendship. Word-jousting was one of the things he enjoyed immensely in Hideyoshi’s company—and now, in particular, as they insisted on dancing around one name. Magoichi refused to introduce so unpleasant a subject, while Hideyoshi, for mysterious reasons of his own, seemed content to pretend that the occasion served no better importance than a regular visit from an old friend.
When he finally decided to breach the subject, however, there was simply no escape.
“I have heard that he has a curious effect on people, but not until now…”
The sentence lingered unfinished as a small, amused smile climbed to Hideyoshi’s lips, as if it was a tribute to a private joke. Magoichi settled for a wordless, noncommittal shrug, feigning part ignorance.
“He is young.” Hideyoshi spoke again in the absence of a satisfactory response, one large hand splayed over a box of lacquered wood, the other around a cooling tea cup. “You must guide him wisely.”
“He’s pretty much set in his ways if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Of course he is. You wouldn’t have stayed at his side otherwise.”
Magoichi sidestepped the insinuation neatly. “Whatever he may be, he is still a rightful lord of a legal dominion.”
“Indeed, and a faithful one.” Hideyoshi nodded, a pleasant, nonchalant smile gracing his features. “And you will help him, Magoichi.”
Inwardly Magoichi winced. There was a limit to the number of times a self-respecting man could feign ignorance in the face of so obvious a suggestion. To say that he was spying on Masamune was not entirely correct, and yet not entirely wrong either. His role was ambiguous at best, treacherous at worst. He tried not to remember Masamune’s smirks, his one remaining eye, his paired guns, his pinpoint precision—all restless with untamed ambitions, ready to stir at the merest hint of war; before Hideyoshi’s good-natured disposition, Masamune looked like an impatient predator scenting the horizon for blood, still prone to impulses and fits of passion.
In many ways, Magoichi reflected wryly, Masamune was a far more difficult master. Sighing deeply, he raised his gaze to meet Hideyoshi’s.
“Is that an order?”
“There is never an order between friends,” Hideyoshi replied mildly, his geniality perfectly unmarred.
Magoichi returned the smile with all the confidence and poise he could muster. That it fooled neither of them only served as further proof that change had indeed sank its claws.
---
“Did he try to win you back?”
Masamune never wasted words under the banner of tactfulness. Magoichi regarded the young lord wryly. The warm welcome he had received from the castle guards upon his return had been a pleasant surprise; this was neither pleasant nor a surprise, and yet he could not profess himself to be disappointed as much as amused.
“If I give you the true answer, will you believe it?”
Sitting by the open window, Masamune smirked, his profile silhouetted by the setting sun. “Maybe.”
“And maybe not.” Magoichi took his seat directly before the other man—a challenge as well as a bet. If Masamune noticed his unusual proximity, then he offered neither hint nor comment to remedy the situation. “For one thing he praised you as faithful.”
“But I am,” the Lord of Oushuu murmured, amusement threading between each word. “I don’t believe he can find anything wrong with me in that regard.”
“Not yet.”
The responding grin was sharp. “What else? Did he also ask you to spy on the one-eyed?”
“Not ‘spy’ as much as ‘guide’,” Magoichi admitted.
Masamune’s laughter, as always, had a jarring edge to it—like the distorted echo of a gunshot; strangely, the sound was not unpleasant. “So,” he drawled, “where are you guiding me, Magoichi?”
“That,” Magoichi murmured, “is a tricky question.”
“Give me a direct answer for once.” This demand was followed by an ominous click as Masamune raised one of his trusted guns, muzzle aimed at the centre of Magoichi’s forehead. This close, he needed neither precision nor expertise to paint the four walls with the content of the mercenary’s head. Magoichi met the threat unblinking, his solemnity unruffled, a well-practiced familiarity.
“In the world of blind men,” he enunciated slowly, half-lidded eyes never leaving Masamune’s, “even a man with one eye can be king.”
“Do you think to tempt me with old sayings?”
“With truth behind them.”
Masamune’s eyes narrowed. A cold wind breathed into the room, past his bared neck and boyishly parted hair, before the gun was finally lowered.
“Imbecile,” he murmured, soft enough to betray a faint tremor the steadiness of his hand would not.
“To be perfectly honest, you’re a very hard man to please,” Magoichi continued, sighing ruefully, “but as it happens, I like a good challenge.”
With a short bark of laugh and a quit rustle of silk, Masamune rose to his full height, his shadow lengthening on tatami floor. The tip of his pistol touched the definition of Magoichi’s chin, tilting his head to a near-uncomfortable angle. “Be careful, Magoichi,” his growl was a low, guttural echo softened by threads of emotion, “because I’ll hold you to that.”
“Naturally,” Magoichi smirked then, assured, “my lord.”
End