What Hideyoshi did after that was a marvel. Without showing the slightest trace of tears, he stepped boldly up onto the stage of taking the realm.
"Our lord's remains, sir..."
When his retainers asked, Hideyoshi lowered his eyes deeply and answered like this.
"In that inferno? The Demon King turned to ash and rose up to heaven."
There was not the slightest hesitation in his voice.
He let no one search any further.
"Dishonor our lord's remains no more. Our lord sleeps peacefully in the ash."
With that one word, no one said anything more.
Saying that, Hideyoshi held Nobunaga's funeral on as grand a scale as could be imagined. Incense was burned, the monks' chanting of sutras rang out, and famous generals lined up, one and all, for offering incense. Reverently raising a coffin with no body in it.
The only person in the world who knew that it was empty was the chief mourner, Hideyoshi.
The world believed it completely. That the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven, Oda Nobunaga, had perished in bitter regret in the flames of Honno-ji.
At that very time, word was also going around that Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had been in Sakai, had fled for his life through the mountains of Iga and made it home to Mikawa. That, terrified of bandits and of hunters of fleeing warriors, crawling along animal trails, he'd finally gotten back to his lands alive.
The cautious Ieyasu had run that desperately. Then Nobunaga's death must have been a sudden catastrophe indeed.
No one knows. That the desperation of that crossing of Iga, too, was Ieyasu's own life-or-death performance, to let me escape.
—And so.
Between the two of them—the cover-up by my public retainer, Hideyoshi, and the escape drama of my soul's friend, Ieyasu—they plastered a single historical fact, "Oda Nobunaga is indeed dead," neatly over the history of the warring age.
Two men who loved me, each in his own place, each in his own way, quietly erased the coward that was me from this world.
As for Mitsuhide, too, the world believes this. That the rebel Akechi Mitsuhide was defeated at Yamazaki, and while fleeing, was set upon by hunters of fleeing warriors and met a miserable end.
The traitor of the three-day reign. The arch-criminal who murdered his lord. People despised him and handed it down that way.
But.
His body, too, they say, was never found with any certainty.
Just like with Nobunaga. As if it had all been arranged.
There is a rumor.
That in some faraway mountain village no one knows, a man getting on in years, who has thrown away the name Akechi. Is living quietly, peacefully, looking after a temple, or so they say.
Tilling a field, teaching children their letters, sipping tea on the veranda at sunset. Ordinary days like that.
—Whether it's true, no one knows.
No one has gone to check.
Only.
That man too, too earnest for his own good, who shouldered his superior's impossible demands all by himself, worked until he was worn down, and couldn't admit weakness to anyone.
Surely, somewhere.
If only he has finally set down that heavy load from his shoulders.
That's what I wish.
You, who took on the most thankless role of all for my sake—I pray you've been rewarded.
And so, the warring age neatly buried one coward.
—And the age after that.
Another scaredy-cat would inherit.