The Assassination of Sakuma Shozan
August 12, 1864. Midday.
He dismounted the horse on the road while the city of Kyoto was still a shape on the horizon rather than a fact around him, handing the reins back to his companion without ceremony and straightening his clothes in the way of a man resuming a posture he had temporarily set aside. The man was small in stature, almost feminine in appearance. His companion on horseback was larger, more authoritative in appearance, and in appearance only.
"Wait until you see them pass," Kawakami Gensai said.
Matsuura Kotaro nodded. He had the horse settled already, the animal accepting the adjustment of riders with its established indifference. "How long do you want me to hold before assuming they've taken a different route?"
"They won't," Gensai said. "This is the road."
He walked.
The stable near Karasuma was the Hayashiya, as their previous companion Murata had said, a modest establishment run by a man of fifty who had the professional quality of someone for whom horses were more predictable than people and who had organized his life accordingly. Gensai told him the horse was for Murata of Tottori, that it would be arriving shortly, and paid for two days' holding in advance. The man wrote something in his ledger and did not ask what a Tottori retainer's horse was doing being arranged by a man from Higo who was not the Tottori retainer. Gensai appreciated this. The teahouse adjacent to the stable had the particular quality of establishments that existed beside working businesses rather than beside pleasure districts: clean, functional, occupied by people who were between tasks rather than making a destination of the place. He sat at the outside bench with a cup of tea and two pieces of mochi, both sweet-flavored, and watched Karasuma's midday traffic with the loose, ambient attention of a man who was waiting for one specific thing and did not intend to miss it in the watching of everything else. The mochi was good. He ate them in the methodical way he ate when he was thinking about something else. He was thinking about the task ahead. He had walked it in his mind several times since the decision was made. One hypothetical scenario after the other. He knew better despite his over-analytical mind. His two years in Kyoto had taught him that a concrete plan can go either way. He was still thinking when he heard the hooves.
Matsuura came in at a gallop and pulled up in the way of a man who had been riding hard and was now stopping hard, the mare's shoes finding the road with the percussive authority of a full stop. He was off the horse before it had fully stilled, handing the reins to the stable boy who had appeared from the yard with the reflexive competence of someone trained to appear for exactly this.
"He's coming," Matsuura said.
He said it without breathing hard, which meant he had been riding with enough control to keep himself functional. Gensai noted this and filed it.
"The travel permit is in the bag on the saddle," Gensai told the stable boy. "Leave it with the saddle. Don't remove it."
The boy nodded. Gensai set the tea cup down. He had not finished it. They walked.
The Sanjo-ohashi bridge had its midday character, foot traffic dense enough that crossing it required attention, the river below moving with the summer's reduced volume, the far bank of the Kamogawa visible in the heat haze with the specific quality of distance that was not quite distance. Gensai settled the straw kasa hat on his head as they crossed.
Matsuura looked at the far bank, then back along the bridge's approach. "Fewer patrols than I expected."
Gensai had noticed this too. The Mimawarigumi presence that had saturated the streets in the days after the Ikedaya raid was absent in the overt way he had anticipated, men were present, authority was present, but the saturation had thinned back to the ordinary background level. A month. Things had settled into whatever shape they were going to hold for now. This was useful. It was also not something to rely on. They came off the bridge onto Sanjo-dori. The street was thick with the afternoon's commerce; merchants, craftsmen, the middle register of Kyoto's daily life going about itself with the indifference of things that had momentum. A food stall near the bridge approach was doing considerable business, the smell of it specific and good, grilled rice crackers lacquered with something sweet. They ate standing, which was how you ate at a stall, both of them oriented outward toward the street in the natural posture of men watching the world go by. Gensai was watching the bridge. Matsuura spoke without turning his head.
"There."
Three horses came off the Sanjo-ohashi at the pace that horses crossed a busy bridge, carefully, slower than the animals preferred, the riders adjusting to the foot traffic that parted around them with the resigned compliance of pedestrians who had learned to coexist with mounted travelers. The lead rider was one of the retainers, a compact, capable-looking man who sat his horse with the ease of regular use. In the middle: Sakuma Shozan, in his dark haori, the bowler hat on his head catching the afternoon light in the way that no other object on the bridge caught anything. Behind: the second retainer, a larger man, his hand resting near his sword with the unconscious readiness of someone who did that automatically. They moved onto Sanjo-dori at the slowest useful pace, picking their way through the crowd.
"Kiyamachi," Gensai said.
The two men were already moving.
"You're certain?" Matsuura asked.
"If he's going to the Palace, he needs to go north and west. Sanjo-dori takes him west but the crowds will slow him the whole way. Kiyamachi is faster — narrower, yes, but the traffic moves differently along the canal." He glanced back once at the three horsemen navigating the midday street. "And if we lose them..." he paused "...a man in a bowler hat on horseback in Kyoto is not difficult to relocate."
Matsuura made a sound that acknowledged the accuracy of this. They turned north. Kiyamachi-dori had the quality of a street that existed beside rather than within the city's main current. The Takase canal ran along its eastern side, the water channeled and deliberate, the sound of it a constant under-presence beneath the street's other sounds. The road itself was narrower than Sanjo , not alley-narrow, but the kind of narrow that required adjustment, that made passing a mounted traveler a negotiation rather than a formality. They had walked perhaps three blocks when Matsuura spoke quietly.
"Behind us."
Gensai did not turn. He walked.
"Turning into Kiyamachi," Matsuura said. "All three. Single file."
The canal road and the traffic had done what Gensai had expected: the three horses, which could move in parallel on a wider street, had compressed into a line. The lead retainer ahead, Sakuma in the middle with a gap opening naturally between himself and the man in front, the second retainer following behind.
Gensai found the alley with his eyes before he turned his head. A narrow space between two buildings, enough for both of them, enough for one man to move forward from without needing to telegraph the movement before it began. He tilted his head. Matsuura read it. They stepped in. The lead retainer passed. Gensai watched him go without watching him, the peripheral count of distance and pace maintained with the interior precision he kept for this. The gap between the lead rider and Sakuma was larger than it should have been, the man ahead had moved into a slightly faster portion of the street's flow, or Sakuma had slowed to look at something, or the crowd had simply done what crowds did and created uneven space. The distance was not tactical. It was accident. But it was there, and it was enough. He looked at Matsuura. Matsuura looked at him.
They moved.
The thing about a horse was that it was not expecting the sword. People trained horses to bear weight, to follow direction, to accept the sounds and smells of combat, but that training was specific and deliberate, and a rental horse in Kyoto's civilian streets had not received it. What it had received was the ordinary training of an urban working animal: traffic, noise, the irregular rhythms of city life. What it had not received was a blade across its cheek. Matsuura's cut was controlled, not deep, not disabling, not intended to kill the animal but to produce from it the maximum possible reaction in the minimum possible time. The horse produced it. It screamed with the specific quality of large animals expressing surprise and pain simultaneously, a sound that cut through the street's ambient noise and reorganized everyone's attention. Its head went up and its front legs followed and it came off the ground entirely for a moment, Matsuura already stepping back out of the arc of the hooves with the read of a man who had calculated where they would land. Sakuma Shozan, who had been riding with the comfortable inattention of a man on a familiar route toward a familiar destination, had no prepared response for a horse that was suddenly not beneath him in the way a horse was supposed to be beneath him. He went backward.
Not gracefully. Not in the manner of a trained horseman taking a controlled fall, simply backward, the momentum of the rearing animal carrying him out of the geometry of his seat and depositing him onto the Kiyamachi-dori road surface with the blunt, disorganized impact of a man who had not planned to be on the ground. He landed. Gensai was already moving. Behind him, the second retainer had come off his horse. On foot, he had decided, correctly, given the space, faster than mounted. He was drawing as he dismounted, his attention on the horse, on Sakuma, on Matsuura, on the immediate chaos of the scene. He was a capable man doing capable things in the order that his training had supplied them. The lead retainer, ahead, had not yet fully processed what was behind him. The crowd's reaction, the recoil, the shouting, the sudden reorganization of foot traffic away from the sound, was traveling forward at its own speed and had not reached him yet.
Gensai registered both of these facts in the time it took to cover the ground between the alley mouth and Sakuma Shozan, which was not very much time at all.
Sakuma was sitting. That was the specific fact. Not fallen flat, not standing, the fall had deposited the aging scholar in a half-seated position, leaning back on one arm, the other hand moving instinctively to find purchase on something that wasn't there. His face had the expression of a man whose body and brain were conducting separate assessments of what had just happened and had not yet compared results. The bowler hat was gone. It sat several feet away on the road surface, already being walked around by the pedestrians who were themselves trying to determine the correct direction to not be.
Gensai reached him. He dropped to one knee. Left hand pulling the scabbard forward from his obi, right hand on the hilt before his hands retracted from each other, pulling blade from sheath. The angle from a kneeling position toward a seated man was specific. The arc of the blade rose rather than fell, tracing a deadly arc across their mark. One movement. Sakuma Shozan shuddered as red blossomed along his clothes, and Gensai was already returning the blade to the scabbard before the old scholar's blood has finished spilling onto the stone-pebbled ground.
Kawakami Gensai stood and walked away just as the crowd registered the horror in the appropriate tone of screaming.