Shogun

Blackthorne, beside the gates, was still turmoiled by his boundless joy at her reprieve and he remembered how his own will had been stretched that night of his near-seppuku, when he had had to get up as a man and walk home as a man unsupported, and became samurai. And he watched her, despising the need for this courage, yet understanding it, even honoring it.

He saw her hands go to the crimson again, and again she pushed and this time Mariko forced herself upright. She wavered and almost fell, then her feet moved and slowly she tottered across the crimson and reeled helplessly toward the main door. Blackthorne decided that she had done enough, had endured enough, had proved enough, so he came forward and caught her in his arms and lifted her up just as her mind left her.

For a moment he stood there in the arena alone, proud that he was alone and that he had decided. She lay like a broken doll in his arms. Then he carried her inside and no one moved or barred his path.

CHAPTER 57

The attack on the Browns' stronghold began in the darkest reaches of the night, two or three hours before dawn. The first wave of ten ninja - the infamous Stealthy Ones - came over the roofs of the battlements opposite, now unguarded by Grays. They threw cloth-covered grappling hooks on ropes over to the other roof and swung across the chasm like so many spiders. They wore tight-fitting clothes of black and black tabi and black masks. Their hands and faces were also blackened. These men were lightly armed with chain knives and shuriken - small, star-shaped, needle-sharp, poison-tipped throwing barbs and discs that were the size of a man's palm. On their backs were slung haversacks and short thin poles.

Ninja were mercenaries. They were artists in stealth, specialists in the disreputable - in espionage, infiltration, and sudden death.

The ten men landed noiselessly. They re-coiled the grapples, and four of them hooked the grapples again onto a projection and immediately swung downward to a veranda twenty feet below. Once they had reached it, as noiselessly, their comrades unhooked the grapples, dropped them down, and moved across the tiles to infiltrate another area.

A tile cracked under one man's foot and they all froze. In the forecourt, three stories and sixty feet below, Sumiyori stopped on his rounds and looked up. His eyes squinted into the darkness. He waited without moving, his mouth open a fraction to improve his hearing, his eyes sweeping slowly. The roof with the ninja was in shadow, the moon faint, the stars heavy in the thick humid air. The men stayed absolutely still, even their breathing controlled and imperceptible, seemingly as inanimate as the tiles upon which they stood.

Sumiyori made another circuit with his eyes and with his ears, and then another, and, still not sure, he walked out into the forecourt to see more clearly. Now the four ninja on the veranda were also within his field of vision but they were as motionless as the others and he did not notice them either.

"Hey," he called to the guards on the gateway, the doors tight barred now, "you see anything - hear anything?"

"No, Captain," the alert sentries said. "The roof tiles are always chattering, shifting a bit - it's the damp or the heat, perhaps."

Sumiyori said to one of them, "Go up there and have a look. Better still, tell the top-floor guards to make a search just in case."

The soldier hurried off. Sumiyori stared up again, then half shrugged and, reassured, continued his patrol. The other samurai went back to their posts, watching outward.

On the rooftop and on the veranda the ninja waited in their frozen positions. Not even their eyes moved. They were schooled to remain immobile for hours if need be just one part of their perpetual training.

Then the leader motioned to them and at once they again moved to the attack. Their grapples and ropes took them quietly to another veranda where they could slide through the narrow windows in the granite walls. Below this top floor, all other windows - defense positions for bowmen - were so narrow that they could not be entered from outside. At another signal the two groups entered simultaneously.

Both rooms were in darkness, with ten Browns sleeping in neat lines. They were put to death quickly and almost noiselessly, a single knife thrust in the throat for most, the raiders' trained senses taking them unerringly to their targets, and in moments the last of the Browns was thrashing desperately, his warning shout garroted just as it had begun. Then, the rooms secured, the doors secured, the leader took out a flint and tinder and lit a candle and carried it, cupped carefully, to the window and signaled three times into the night. Behind him his men were making doubly sure that every Brown was quite dead. The leader repeated the signal, then came away from the window and motioned with his hand, speaking to them in sign language with his fingers.