When the news reached the camp in Bitchu.
Hashiba Hideyoshi, they say, collapsed sobbing aloud.
"Our lord... my lord, by that wretch Akechi..."
Hands on the ground, shoulders shaking, he wept openly, with no thought for who saw. A grown man, scraping the body of his armor in the dirt, crying like a child. His tears, they say, caught the light of the bonfires and shone with a true light.
The generals ranged around him all wept with him. Was there any other retainer who loved his lord so, they said.
—Or so Monkey himself told me, laughing, much later.
Sitting side by side on the ridge between fields, stuffing our cheeks with rice balls.
"Ah, my lord. That once, this Bald Rat was well and truly had. When I heard the news, there in front of the generals, I went and slammed the ground, like so, and sobbed for real. ...Thinking back on it now, the one who grieved the hardest was the biggest dunce of the lot."
"...I'm sorry I couldn't tell you."
No more words came than that. For my sake, he'd cried for real in front of his men.
But because that same Hideyoshi eventually figured everything out, I'm alive and eating like this now.
Hideyoshi moved uncannily fast.
The instant he heard the terrible news of Honno-ji, he made peace with the Mori, whom he'd been facing, quick as lightning. And then he turned his whole army around, back toward Kyoto. What the world calls the Great Return from Chugoku.
A road of more than two hundred leagues, in just ten days.
Generals and soldiers alike ran, half in tears. Even when their straw sandals wore through and the soles of their feet were covered in blood blisters, Hideyoshi didn't stop. At night the torches crawled along the mountain roads in a long line, and by day the dust covered the sky. Barely eating, not sleeping, only east, ever east.
"Run! Run! We go to avenge our lord!"
Hauling up the arms of soldiers about to collapse with his own hands, covered in mud himself, Hideyoshi ran at the head.
Watching his back, his men trembled. Such loyalty to his lord. Such tenacity. Hashiba Chikuzen was no ordinary man after all, they said.
And so Hideyoshi clashed with Akechi Mitsuhide's army at Yamazaki.
Tennozan.
The battle was decided easily. Before the momentum of Hideyoshi, burning with a war of vengeance, the isolated Akechi army crumbled.
The world would hand it down like this. Hashiba Hideyoshi, devoted to his lord, splendidly struck down the rebel Akechi Mitsuhide.
But.
All through the battle, Hideyoshi's heart had been uneasy. Even amid the victory cries, even amid the praise of his generals. One single thing had caught in his chest like a little thorn and wouldn't come loose.
—Our lord's body.
No matter where they looked.
It couldn't be found.
Not in the burned temple, not past what looked like an escape route. After a catastrophe that great, not a single person said they had seen their lord's remains.
When the battle was over, Hideyoshi rode alone to the ruins of burned-down Honno-ji. Shaking off the praise and the celebrations, as if something were calling him.
And when he stood in the ruins, still warm with lingering heat.
This man, who read people's hearts more deeply than anyone, alone, noticed one single thing.