An invading army is coming into Owari in the wet season, and Aoyagi Tadayoshi, a minor Oda retainer of twenty-three, expects to die buying time.
His actual task turns out to be small, physical and unglamorous: find a road a body of men can walk without swimming, and confirm by eye where the invading commander's headquarters has actually halted — not where the plan assumes it has.
He loses the first fight in the book and every fight after it. Villages lower their poles behind him one after another. A guide walks his party onto a ford where riders are already waiting in the reeds.
And what he finally finds, he finds because of the weather that has been ruining him — because in heavy rain smoke will not rise.
