The Amtrack Wars - Earth Thunder Part 28

'When these facts are laid before her she will want to kill Ieyasu and her brother because it all fits in neatly with what she already knows and because it is what she wants to hear.

'We must make sure nothing stops her. We have to arrange for the evidence she needs to be put in place, plus the means to commit murder." He gestured towards Roz.

'Rain-Dancer and I can provide much of this, but first we need more details about the organisation of the Inner Court and the personalities who surround the Shogun.

Plus a body of stout-hearted hors.e.m.e.n willing to ride with us into the Toh-Yota heartland and aid our escape when the deed is done."

Lord Min-Orota could hardly believe his ears. 'You intend to enter the Shogun's palace?"

'If necessary, yes."

There was a long silence, then Sakimoto said: 'I hate to admit this, but you may have actually produced a plan that could work. It has some exquisite touches.

You deserve to be made an honorary Iron Master."

Cadillac bowed low. 'You are most gracious, sire. But it would be too great an honour for such an unworthy outlander. We are happy to be accepted into your presence and your confidence as we are, and to offer you, on behalf of the Plainfolk, whatever a.s.sistance we can."

'There's something I'd like to know,' said Lord Na-Shona.

He was one of the few who had refrained from dishing up the dirt. 'If the Lady Mishiko takes the bait, how will she kill Lord Ieyasu and Prince Yoritomo?"

'That, sire, must remain a secret - for reasons I am sure you understand."

Aishi Sakimoto could hardly contain his excitement at the prospect of toppling the Toh-Yota family. 'If you succeed, you will both be richly rewarded."

Cadillac bowed again. 'We seek no reward, sire, other than a firm and continuing friendship between our two nations. But even though we are able to call upon powerful magic we need your help and guidance to gain access to the Lady Mishiko. Will you furnish us with the men, ships and resources we require?"

Sakimoto did not hesitate. 'You shall have them."

CHAPTER SIX.

The large fortified residence known as the Winter Palace was situated at Showa, ten miles inland from the port of Oshana-sita, and some four miles south of the state line between Delaware and Maryland. The whole of the peninsular from Wilmington across to the neck of Delaware bay and down to the southern tip with its garland of islands which had been part of Virginia, belonged to the Toh-Yota. During their eighty-year reign, the family had built or taken over five similar strongholds on the mainland, but since his accession, the Shogun had chosen to spend the winter months at Showa - hence its name.

It was towards the Winter Palace that Lord Kiyomori Min-Orota led his mounted and wheeled entourage, after journeying in three boats, along ca.n.a.l, river and coastline from Sara-kusa to a small backwater port some fifteen miles north of Oshana-sita.

At the head of the slower-moving baggage-train was a closed carriage-box containing Cadillac and Roz, masked and cloaked in the style of travelling courtesans. This disguise had been proposed by Cadillac, who had already made one successful trip across Ne-Issan posing as a high-priced lady from the 'floating world'.

Following the baggage-train at irregular intervals and in three unevenly-sized groups were samurai hors.e.m.e.n supplied by Aishi Sakimoto.

These were also travelling in disguise. The two largest appeared to be road-convoys of merchants and cart-drivers carrying goods from Fin, the other a group of horse-traders with several promising-looking mounts in tow and papers which identified them as coming from the domain of Toh-Shiba family. In a further attempt to conceal the fact that they formed one coherent group, Lord Min-Orota's party was separated from the rearmost road-convoy by some four hours, and they were all travelling via different routes to their alloted positions around the Winter Palace.

Aishi Sakimoto, the acting head of the Yamas.h.i.ta family, had chosen Lord MinOrota to make contact with Lady Mishiko because of his face-saving leap into the Shogun's camp following the death of his coconspirator, Domain-Lord Hirohito Yamas.h.i.ta.

Kiyo Min-Orota was widely regarded as someone not to be wholly trusted by either side. Inviting him to the meeting had been a gamble but it had paid off. Kiyo, despite his opportunism, was committed to the progressive movement, and the task he had now been given fitted exactly with people's expectations of him.

Sakimoto knew that Ieyasu - who had learned of the meeting at Sara-kusa - would be expecting to hear from Lord Min-Orota. He would not be disappointed. Kiyo was on his way to tell Ieyasu that the Yama-s.h.i.ta had uncovered d.a.m.ning proof that he had - with the help of the Federation - deployed a network of agents equipped with communication devices powered by the Dark Light: proof in the form of doc.u.ments, equipment and two captured long-dog agents disguised as Mute slaves.

As a stalwart ally, Kiyo would say he had brought this news out of concern for the damage it would do to the Shogun and the Toh-Yota family once the accusation, and the attendant rumours, began to be spread by their enemies throughout Ne-Issan.

Min-Orota himself was convinced Ieyasu would do his level best to contain this dismaying news instead of pa.s.sing it on to the Shogun.

Indeed, as he had argued at Sara-kusa, when everything was taken into account, it was obvious that Yoritomo did not know what Ieyasu had been up to. Keeping it secret over the past years had enabled Ieyasu to reinforce his position as the man who knew everything, and that in turn had helped him discredit the newly-created College of Heralds - forcing Yoritomo back into a position of total dependence upon him.

But there were two things Min-Orota, the loyal and trusted friend, did not intend to reveal. First was that, besides briefing the Court Chamberlain, he also planned to spill the entire can of beans to the Lady Mishiko who, because of her animosity towards Ieyasu for his past interference in her life, would be only too pleased to tell her brother the good news. And second, was that the conspirators planned to use a deadly mixture of fact, fiction and Mute magic to poison Lady Mishiko's mind and turn her into an a.s.sa.s.sin ....

Lady Mishiko, at this point in time, knew nothing of this.

Since the welcome death of her husband and the untimely demise of her lover Toshiro Hase-Gawa, she had become a semi-recluse living in her brother's household, while she tried to put the pieces of her shattered life back together.

With her three children and her small personal retinue of servants, she had her own permanent apartments in all the princely households, and followed her brother in his seasonal moves around his four domains.

Mishiko was the only close relative so favoured; her three elder sisters, all married, as she had been, into n.o.ble houses closely allied with the Toh-Yota, were only seen at court on great state occasions such as the annual ceremony each spring when the domain-lords of Ne-Issan gathered in all their martial splendour to renew their oath of fealty to the Shogun.

But as the Inner Court gossips knew, Mishiko's sisters had not become one of the permanent focal points of their younger brother's warped desires. Each of them, before being married off, had been bullied or cajoled into submitting to varying degrees of physical intimacy and responding in kind, but for one reason or another his interest in them had slackened then disappeared entirely (to their great relief) as Mishiko began to blossom into womanhood.

Most n.o.blewomen had small bosoms, some had almost flat chests like men, and this had become the accepted fashion. The traditional upper-cla.s.s j.a.panese style of dress was not designed to display the female bosom, and any woman whose chest measurements exceeded the norm took care to conceal her abundance under a binding cloth.

On reaching p.u.b.erty, Mishiko's b.r.e.a.s.t.s had budded quickly and to her dismay had continued to grow full and firm, surmounted with generous nipples. Tormented by her slim-breasted sisters, she was haunted by visions of being weighed down by two overripe melons like her moon-faced Korean wet-nurse, but to her great relief this hadn't happened.

By her sixteenth birthday- the age when n.o.ble families started thinking about suitable marriage partners - Mis-hiko was left generously endowed but not grossly overburdened.

But by that time, she' was no longer a virgin.

Yoritomo, gripped by the feverish fantasies that plague young men as the sap begins to rise, had already forced himself upon her.

Having shared the bathtub with Mishiko and his other sisters from early childhood to the age of p.u.b.erty, Yoritomo had seen her b.r.e.a.s.t.s begin to bud. From that moment on, using a great deal of ingenuity, he had contrived to spy upon her nakedness. The vision of her swelling body and the desire to fondle it - as she herself did in her most private moments - became an obsession.

It was, as he confessed to her later, like a worm in the brain - eating away at his sanity.

Given the dissolute atmosphere that permeated the Inner Court during his father's reign, it was hardly surprising that Yoritomo's incestuous desires were able to flourish unnoticed and unchecked. As the heir to the throne, the courtiers who served his father treated him with the utmost deference, and his sisters were also obliged to humour him for fear of what might happen to them when he became the Shogun.

It took some while for Yoritomo to realise this but when he did, and finally summoned up the courage to turn his youthful fantasies into reality, he began the fumbling s.e.xual conquest of his sisters. One by one, singly and in pairs, with increasing proficiency, the secret liaisons continued until the magic moment when Mishiko came of age.

Like her sisters before her, Mishiko had submitted because she dared not do otherwise. The actual physical relationship had ended six years ago with her marriage to Consul-General Nakane Toh-Shiba. She had never spoken of it - not even to the Herald - and no one had ever alluded to it in her presence, but by the very nature of life at court, the affair had not remained a secret for very long. With her return as a widow to her brother's household, Mishiko had nervously awaited the summons to Yoritomo's bed-chamber, but to her great relief it had not come. Having lost an unloved husband and a lover who embodied everything she desired in the s.p.a.ce of a few weeks, she was an emotional wreck. She had nurtured the dream that one day she might be free to marry the Herald, and with the death of Nakane at the Heron Pool that day had come. For one delirious moment her whole life had been transformed and then, just as quickly, the dream - which her children had shared - had been brutally crushed.

In the three years during which the secret romance had blossomed, Mishiko had learned to conceal her true feelings, but to have been forced, so soon after the event, to give her body to the man who had sent the Herald to his death would have stripped away the last shreds of self-respect and destroyed her reason.

Fortunately, her fears proved groundless. It was dear from the way her brother looked at her in the brief moments of relative privacy that life at court afforded them, that his youthful desires for her had been rekindled, but the message in his eyes was not matched by word or deed, and was contradicted by a certain coldness in his manner.

Instead of gratefully accepting that she was no longer the subject of his unwanted attentions, Mishiko began to wonder why this should be so and came up with two possible reasons for Yoritomo's detachment: he either regarded her as shop-soiled goods because of her illicit physical relationship with the Herald, or he was trying to suppress his own secret desires in order to live up to the incorruptible image he had created for his role as Shogun, Ruler of the Seventeen Domains of Ne-Issan.

Or both.

And with inexplicable perverseness, even though the emotional scars would never heal, Mishiko started to return his smouldering glances but made no other overt sign or gesture. While earning his forgiveness, she too would play the detached temptress. And with patient guile she would lure this saintly prince who had so ill-used her down from his lofty pedestal.

And destroy him ....