They were watching with nauseated fascination which they unsuccessfully tried to hide. His appetite began to slip away. He tried to dismiss them but could not, his stomach growling. Hiding his irritation, he put down the bowl and replaced the lid and told them gruffly it was not to his taste. He ordered Nigatsu to take it away.
"Should it- be thrown away then, Fujiko asks," Mariko said hopefully.
"Yes."
Fujiko and Buntaro relaxed.
"Would you like more rice?" Fujiko asked.
"No, thank you."
Mariko waved her fan, smiled encouragingly, and refilled his sake cup. But Blackthorne was not soothed and he resolved in the future to cook in the hills in private, to eat in private, and to hunt openly.
To hell with them, he thought. If Toranaga can hunt, so can I. When am I going to see him? How long do I have to wait?
"The pox on waiting and the pox on Toranaga!" he said aloud in English and felt better.
"What, Anjin-san?" Mariko asked in Portuguese.
"Nothing," he replied. "I was just wondering when I'd see Lord Toranaga."
"He didn't tell me. Very soon, I imagine."
Buntaro was slurping his sake and soup loudly as was custom. This began to annoy Blackthorne. Mariko talked cheerfully with her husband, who grunted, hardly acknowledging her. She was not eating, and it further irked him that both she and Fujiko were almost fawning on Buntaro and also that he himself had to put up with this unwanted guest.
"Tell Buntaro-sama that in my country a host toasts the honored guest." He lifted his cup with a grim smile. "Long life and happiness!" He drank.
Buntaro listened to Mariko's explanation. He nodded in agreement, lifted his cup in return, smiled through his teeth, and drained it.
"Health!" Blackthorne toasted again.
And again.
And again.
"Health!"
This time Buntaro did not drink. He put down the full cup and looked at Blackthorne out of his small eyes. Then Buntaro called to someone outside. The shoji slid open at once. His guard, ever present, bowed and handed him the immense bow and quiver. Buntaro took it and spoke vehemently and rapidly to Blackthorne.
"My husband - my husband says you wanted to see him shoot, Anjin-san. He thinks tomorrow is too far away. Now is a good time. The gateway of your house, Anjin-san. He asks which post do you choose?"
"I don't understand;" Blackthorne said. The main gate would be forty paces away, somewhere across the garden, but now completely masked by the closed shoji wall to his right.
"The left or the right post? Please choose." Her manner was urgent.
Warned, he looked at Buntaro. The man seemed detached, oblivious of them, a squat ugly troll who sat gazing into the distance.
"Left," he said, fascinated.
"Hidari!" she said.
At once Buntaro slid an arrow from the quiver and, still sitting, set up the bow, raised it, drew back the bowstring to eye level and released the shaft with savage, almost poetic liquidity. The arrow slashed toward Mariko's face, touched a strand of her hair in passing, and disappeared through the shoji paper wall. Another arrow was launched almost before the first had vanished, and then another, each one coming within an inch of impaling Mariko. She remained calm and motionless, kneeling as she had always been.
A fourth arrow and then a last. The silence was filled with the echo of the twanging bowstring. Buntaro sighed and came back slowly. He put the bow across his knees. Mariko and Fujiko sucked in their breaths and smiled and bowed and complimented Buntaro and he nodded and bowed slightly. They looked at Blackthorne. He knew that what he had witnessed was almost magical. All the arrows had gone through the same hole in the shoji.
Buntaro handed the bow back to his guard and picked up his tiny cup. He stared at it a moment, then raised it to Blackthorne, drained it and spoke harshly, his brutish self again.
"He - my husband asks, politely, please go and look."
Blackthorne thought a moment, trying to still his heart. "There's no need. Of course he hit the target."
"He says he would like you to be sure."
"I'm sure."
"Please, Anjin-san. You would honor him."
"I don't need to honor him."
"Yes. But may I please quietly add my request."
Again the plea was in her eyes.
"How do I say, 'That was marvelous to watch'?"
She told him. He said the words and bowed. Buntaro bowed perfunctorily in return.
"Ask him please to come with me to see the arrows."
"He says that he would like you to go by yourself. He does not wish to go, Anjin-san."
"Why?"
"If he has been accurate, senhor, you should see that by yourself. If not, you should see that alone too. Then neither you nor he can be embarrassed."
"And if he's missed?"
"He hasn't. But by our custom accuracy under such impossible circumstances is unimportant compared to the grace that the archer shows, the nobility of movement, his strength to shoot sitting, or the detachment about the winning or losing."
The arrows were within an inch of each other in the middle of the left post. Blackthorne looked back at the house and he could see, forty-odd paces away, the small neat hole in the paper wall that was a spark of light in the darkness.
It's almost impossible to be so accurate, he thought. From where Buntaro was sitting he couldn't see the garden or the gate, and it was black night outside. Blackthorne turned back to the post and raised the lantern higher. With one hand he tried to pull out an arrow. The steel head was buried too deep. He could have snapped the wooden shaft but he did not wish to.
The guard was watching.
Blackthorne hesitated. The guard came forward to help but he shook his head, "Iye, domo," and went back inside.