Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/99

Lord Tadanao was in high spirits, and he smiled pleasantly as he put his questions. But this affability only increased the embarrassment of his councillors. It was some time before one of them gathered up sufficient courage to make a reply, and when he spoke his voice trembled.

“I fear your lordship is mistaken. The fact that the Echizen forces took no part in today’s fighting seems to have aroused his excellency’s anger, and …”

He ventured no more. The colour drained from his face, and he prostrated himself on the ground.

Never having known how it felt to be crossed or scolded, Lord Tadanao had developed no mechanism of resistance to the sensation, and no means of controlling himself when under its influence.

“Eh! What did he say?” he bellowed. “When I begged to lead the attack he forbade it. And does he still affront me? Tadanao, die!—that is the meaning of my grandfather’s riddles. To all of us, to you as well as to myself, he says—die! Tomorrow, then, lord and vassal alike, we shall drench the enemy’s swords with our blood! Our corpses will whiten and rot beneath the castle walls! Tell this to my soldiers, and let them prepare themselves for death!”

Tadanao’s hands, folded on his lap, were visibly trembling. With a sudden movement, as if he could bear the restraint no longer, he snatched his Nagamitsu sword from the hands of a page boy, unsheathed the blade, and thrust it forward before the councillors’ faces.

“See! On this Nagamitsu I shall spike the head of Hideyori, and thus shall I thrust it into my grandfather’s face!”

Seated on the floor though he was, he brandished the sword above his head and cut a series of wide circles in the air.

Lord Tadanao, not much over twenty, was still subject to occasional half-lunatic tantrums of this sort. His councillors, whose experience of such outbursts dated back to the days of Tadanao’s father, merely shut their ears to the noise and lay prostrate on the ground, as if waiting for a gale to blow over.