The Samurai- Part 3

8.
“Come in, come in!” Saito exclaimed.

He stood and walked, with little regard for his steps, but somehow not disturbing  the slightest ripple of fabric or strand of hair. The man was incredible.

“Jun…Hideki!, my friends, come and sit awhile,” he said with a hearty laugh, but under his breath he added, “I’m unsure whether I will be able to remove myself from these wily clutches. I’m not sure that I would want to.”

“You’re still planning on joining us, out to the bridge construction?” Hideki asked.

“No, he’s proposing that we stay awhile,” replied Jun, offhandedly.

“Not at all,” Saito said with a catbird grin and a mighty wink.

“Daylight is wasting, and I want to return before dusk. Coming or not, we should proceed. But when we return I would like to help untie the knots on your floor, there,” added Jun with mild innocence.

Thundering laughter and glad handing all around, the three began their preparations to venture forth from the den of nearly drunken debauchery.

The debauchery could wait.

9.
They rode through the well worn streets of town, until the streets gave way to dirt road, and the road dwindled to a path through the forest. This was the only route out of their valley that led, eventually, to the capital, as long as one could ford the river that bisected the path and ending in waterfall  from the plateau upon which the town was perched.

Until recently, the only means of doing so was to pay the ferryman and wait as the old codger pulled slowly at the rope strung across the swirling torrent.  He did not ask much, a handful of rice or a coin or two, but his barge was only large enough to carry  between four men or two men with horses at a time.
Therefore, it was put forth by the Shogun, wanting all of his loyal subjects to have easy access to the capital, especially when they might be carrying all of that precious iron ore to trade. The town, nestled in a mountain valley, among crags and peaks, had discovered that they were sitting on a veritable gold mine’s worth of iron ore.  So they started mining the ore.

Is was soon realized, however, that the ore would only come trickling out of the mountains as long as there was no reliable passage across the river.  And that simply could not stand.
The Shogun dispatched, with all possible haste, his loyal surveyors and architects, and they devised a means by which the river could be bridged. But with the volume and quickness of the waters, the plan was easier set than completed.

Forming the support structures in the water was proving to be quite the deadly endeavor. So far, eleven workers had been washed away downstream, found battered and bloody at the base of the waterfall. So many had succumbed that the chief supervisor on the project had ordered the construction of a small camp at the base to attempt a speedier recovery of the victims. It always happened so suddenly, it was hard to be sure whether the men were dead on arrival or surviving the fall, only to have deeper injuries take them in due course. At least two of them looked as though they may have been alive long enough to crawl ashore before expiring.

The Shogun’s advisors were asking Jun’s father for more men to replace the fallen, but word had spread. The wages kept increasing, but so, too, did the danger.  It was to this end that Jun was asked to ride to the construction and see if he could assist in any way, primarily to study the structure and report back the true nature of the dangers involved. Jun was no architect. He was intelligent and had good instincts, as well as the complete faith of his father.