The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Page 32

  One in ten, one in twelve births in the house ends with a dead woman.

  Through stony ice and needle drifts she finds a sheltered bowl.

  With your knowledge and skill—this is no vain boast—it would be one in thirty.

  The wind’s quick sleeves catch on the thorny glassy trees.

  “If you turn back,” Orito warns herself, “you know what the men will do.”

  She finds the trail where the slope of torî gates begins. Their daylight cinnabar orange is black against the night sky.

  Nobody can ask me to submit to enslavement, not even Yayoi.

  Then Orito considers the weapon she acquired in the scriptorium.

  To doubt one New Year letter—she could threaten Genmu—is to doubt them all.

  Would the sisters consent to the terms of the house if they weren’t sure their gifts were alive and well in the world below?

  Bitter hatred, she would add, does not make for fruitful pregnancies.

  The path turns a sharp corner. The constellation of the Hunter appears.

  No. Orito dismisses the half thought. I shall never go back.

  She concentrates on the steep and icy path. An injury now could ruin her hopes of reaching Otane’s cottage by dawn. An eighth of an hour later, Orito turns a high corner above the wood-and-vine bridge called Todoroki and catches her breath. Mekura Gorge plunges down the mountainside, vast as the sky …

  … A BELL IS RINGING at the shrine. It is not the deep time bell but a higher-pitched, insistent bell, rung in the House of Sisters when one of the women goes into labor. Orito imagines Yayoi calling her. She imagines the frantic disbelief prompted by her disappearance, the searches throughout the precincts, and the discovery of her rope. She imagines Master Genmu being woken: The newest sister is gone …

  She imagines knotted twin fetuses blocking the neck of Yayoi’s womb.

  Clattering acolytes may be dispatched down the path, the halfway gatehouse will be told of her disappearance, and the domain checkpoints at Isahaya and Kashima will be alerted tomorrow, but the Kyôga Mountains are an eternity of forest for fugitives to vanish into. You shall go back, Orito thinks, only if you choose to.

  She imagines Master Suzaku, helpless, as Yayoi’s screams scald the air.

  The bell could be a trick, she considers, to lure you back.

  Far, far below, the Ariake Sea is burnished by the moonlight.

  What may be a trick tonight will be the truth tomorrow night, or very soon …

  “The liberty of Aibagawa Orito,” Orito speaks out loud, “is more important than the life of Yayoi and her twins.” She examines the truth of the statement.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  SHUZAI’S ROOM AT HIS DOJO HALL IN NAGASAKI

  Afternoon of the thirteenth day of the first month

  “I SET OUT EARLY,” SHUZAI REPORTS. “AT JIZO-SAMA’S STATUE at the marketplace, I lit a three-sen candle to ensure against mishap, and I soon had cause to be grateful for the precaution. Trouble found me by Ômagori Bridge. A captain in the shogunal guard on horseback blocked my path: he’d glimpsed my scabbard under my straw cape and wanted to check that I had the rank to carry one. ‘Fortune never favors he who wears another’s clothes,’ so I gave him my true name. Lucky it was I did. He dismounted, removed his own helmet, and called me ‘Sensei’: I taught one of his sons when I first arrived in Nagasaki. We talked awhile, and I told him I was bound for Saga, for my old master’s seventh-year funeral ceremony. Servants wouldn’t be appropriate on such a pilgrimage, I claimed. The captain was embarrassed by this attempt to disguise my poverty, so he agreed, bade me good luck, and rode on.”

  Four students are practicing their best kendo shrieks in the dojo.

  Uzaemon feels a cold blossoming in his sore throat.

  “From Oyster Bay—a midden of fishermen’s hovels, shells, and rotting rope—I turned north to Isahaya. Low, hilly land, as you know, and on a dismal first-month afternoon, the road is atrocious. By a crooked bend, four porters appeared from behind a shuttered-up tea shack—a leerier pack of wild dogs you never saw. Each carried a hefty bludgeon in his scabby hand. They warned me that robbers would pounce upon a luckless, friendless, helpless traveler like myself and urged me to hire them so I’d arrive at Isahaya unharmed. I drew my sword and assured them I was not as luckless, friendless, or helpless as they believed. My gallant saviors melted away, and I reached Isahaya without further excitement. Here I avoided the bigger, more conspicuous inns and took lodgings in the loft of a talkative tea roaster. The only other guest was a peddler of amulets and charms from holy places as far off as Ezo, so he claimed.”

  Uzaemon catches his sneeze in a paper square, which he tosses onto the fire.

  Shuzai hangs the kettle low over the flames. “I tapped my landlord for what he knew about Kyôga Domain. ‘Eighty square miles of mountain with not one town worthy of the name,’ save for Kashima. The lord abbot takes a cut from the temples there and harvests rice taxes from the coastal villages, but his real power flows from allies in Edo and Miyako. He feels secure enough to maintain just two divisions of guards: one to keep up appearances when his entourage travels and one barracked in Kashima to quell any local troubles. The amulet peddler told me how he’d once tried to visit the shrine on Mount Shiranui. He’d spent several hours climbing up a steep ravine called Mekura Gorge, only to be turned back at a gatehouse halfway up. Three big village thugs, he complained, told him that Shiranui Shrine doesn’t trade in lucky charms. I put it to the peddler that it’s a rare shrine that turns away paying pilgrims. The peddler agreed, then told me this story from the reign of Kan’ei, when the harvests failed for three years all across Kyushu. Towns as far off as Hirado, Hakata, and Nagasaki suffered starvation and riots. It was this famine, swore the peddler, that led to rebellion in Shimabara and the humiliation of the shogun’s first army. During the mayhem, a quiet samurai begged Shogun Ieyasu for the honor of leading, and financing, a battalion in the second attempt to crush the rebels. He fought so audaciously that after the last Christian head was hoisted on the last pike, a shogunal decree obliged the disgraced Nabeshima clan of Hizen to cede the samurai not only a certain obscure shrine on Mount Shiranui but the entire mountainous region. Kyôga Domain was created by that decree, and the quiet samurai’s full title became Lord Abbot Kyôga-no-Enomoto-no-kami. The present lord abbot must be his”—Shuzai calculates on his fingers—“his great-great-grandson, give or take a generation.”

  He pours tea for Uzaemon, and both men light their pipes.

  “The sea fog was thick the next morning, and after a mile I struck off east, circling Isahaya from the north, around to the Ariake Sea Road. Better to enter Kyôga Domain, I reckoned, without the guards at the gate seeing my face. I walked along half the morning, passing through several villages with my hood down, until I found myself at the notice board of the village of Kurozane. Crows were at work, unpicking a crucified woman. It stank! Seaward, the fog was dividing itself between weak sky and brown mudflats. Three old mussel gatherers were resting on a rock. I asked them what any traveler would: how far to Konagai, the next village along? One said four miles, the second said less, the third said farther; only the last had ever been, and that was thirty years ago. I made no mention of Otane the herbalist but asked about the crucified woman, and they told me she’d been beaten most nights for three years by her husband and had celebrated the New Year by opening his head with a hammer. The lord abbot’s magistrate had ordered the executioner to behead her cleanly, which gave me a chance to ask whether Lord Abbot Enomoto was a fair master. Perhaps they didn’t trust a stranger with an alien accent, but they all agreed they’d been born here as rewards for good deeds in previous lives. The lord of Hizen, one pointed out, stole one farmer’s son in eight for military duties and bled his villagers white to keep his family in Edo in luxury. In contrast, the lord of Kyôga imposed the rice tax only when the harvest was good, ordered a supply of food and oil for the shrine on Mount Shiranui, and required no mo
re than three guards for the Mekura Gorge gate. In return, the shrine guaranteed fertile streams for the rice paddies, a bay teeming with eels, and baskets full of seaweed. I wondered how much rice the shrine ate in a year. Fifty koku, they said, or enough for fifty men.”

  Fifty men! Uzaemon is dismayed. We need an army of mercenaries.

  Shuzai shows no undue concern. “After Kurozane, the road passes a smart-looking inn, the Harubayashi, as in ‘spring bamboo.’ A short distance on, an uphill track turns off the coast road and leads up to the mouth of Mekura Gorge. The trail up the mountain is well maintained, but it took me half the day. The guards at the checkpoint don’t expect intruders, that much was clear—one well-placed sentinel would have seen me coming—but …” Shuzai wrinkles his mouth to indicate an easy climb. “The gatehouse seals a narrow mouth of the gorge, but you’d not need ten years of ninja training to climb up around it, which was what I did. Higher up, patches of snow and ice appeared, and pine and cedar muscled out the lowland trees. The track climbs a couple more hours to a high bridge over the river; a stone marker names the place Todoroki. Not long after, there’s a long, steep corridor of torî gates, where I left the path and climbed up through a pine forest. I came to the lip of an outcrop midway up Bare Peak, and this drawing”—Shuzai removes a square of paper hidden in a folded book—“is based on the sketches I made on the spot.”

  Uzaemon surveys Orito’s prison for the first time.

  Shuzai empties dead ash from his pipe. “The shrine sits in this triangular hollow between Bare Peak above and those two lesser ridges. My guess is that a castle from the Age of Warring States once sat on the site claimed by Enomoto’s ancestor in the amulet peddler’s tale—note these defensive walls and the dry moat. You’d need twenty men and a battering ram to force those gates, too. But don’t be disheartened: any wall is only as strong as the men defending it, and a child with a grappling hook would be over in a minute. Nor is there any chance of getting lost once we’re inside. Now this”—Shuzai points his bowstring-calloused forefinger—“is the House of Sisters.”

  Unguardedly, Uzaemon asks, “Did you see her?”

  Shuzai shakes his head. “I was too far away. The remaining daylight I spent searching for ways down from Bare Peak other than the Mekura Gorge, but there are none: this northeast ridge hides a drop of several hundred feet, and to the northwest, the forest is so dense you’d need four hands and a tail to make any headway. At dusk, I headed back down the gorge and reached the halfway gate just as the moon rose. I climbed over a bluff to the lower path, reached the mouth of Mekura Gorge, crossed the rice terraces behind Kurozane, and found a fishing boat to sleep under on the road to Isahaya. It was damp and cold, but I didn’t want witnesses coming to share a fire. I returned to Nagasaki by the following evening, but let three days pass before contacting you to hide the link between my absence and your visit. It is safest to assume that your servant is in Enomoto’s pay.”

  “Yohei has been my servant since the Ogawa family adopted me.”

  Shuzai shrugs. “What better spy than one above suspicion?”

  Uzaemon’s cold feels worse by the minute. “Do you have solid reason to doubt Yohei?”

  “None at all, but all daimyo retain informers in neighboring domains, and these informers acquire understandings with major families’ servants. Your father is one of only four interpreters of the first rank on Dejima: the Ogawas are not people of no importance. To spirit away a daimyo’s favorite is to enter a dangerous world, Uzaemon. To survive, you must doubt Yohei, doubt your friends, and doubt strangers. Knowing all this, the question is: are you still intent on liberating her?”

  “More than ever, but”—Uzaemon looks at the map—“can it be done?”

  “Given careful planning, given money to hire the right men, yes.”

  “How much money and how many men?”

  “Less than you’d suppose, is the good news: the fifty koku the seaweed gatherers talked about sounds daunting, but a fair portion of that fifty is eaten by Enomoto’s entourage. What’s more, that building”—Shuzai points to the lower right corner—“is the refectory, and when it emptied after dinner, I counted just thirty-three heads. The women I discount. The masters will be past their prime, which leaves at most two dozen able-bodied acolytes. In Chinese legends, monks may shatter rocks with their bare hands, but the goslings of Shiranui are hatched from much frailer eggs. There was no archery range in the shrine, no barracks for lay guards, and no evidence of martial training. Five excellent swordsmen, in my opinion, could rescue Miss Aibagawa. My policy of double insurance calls for ten swords, in addition to yours and mine.”

  “What if Lord Enomoto and his men appear before we attack?”

  “We postpone our venture, disperse, and hide in Saga until he leaves.”

  Smoke from the struggling fire tastes of salt and bitterness.

  “You’ll have considered,” Shuzai says, raising a delicate point, “that to return to Nagasaki with Miss Aibagawa would be … would be …”

  “Tantamount to suicide. Yes, I have considered little else this last week. I shall”—Uzaemon sneezes and coughs—“I shall abandon my life here, accompany her to wherever she wishes to go, and help her until she orders me to leave. A day, or my lifetime, whichever she chooses.”

  The swordsman frowns, nods, and watches his friend and student.

  Out in the street, dogs run past, barking murderously.

  “I worry,” admits Uzaemon, “about you being linked to this raid.”

  “Oh, I assume the worst. I, too, shall move on.”

  “You are sacrificing your life in Nagasaki in order to help me?”

  “I prefer to blame Nagasaki’s particularly menacing creditors.”

  “Won’t our hired men also be making fugitives of themselves?”

  “Masterless samurai are used to looking after themselves. Make no mistake: the man with the most to lose is Ogawa Uzaemon. You are exchanging a career, a stipend, a bright future …” The older man casts around for a tactful phrase.

  “… for a woman—in all likelihood a broken, pregnant woman.”

  Shuzai’s expression replies, Yes.

  “Or thanking my adoptive father by disappearing without a word?”

  My suffering wife, at least, Uzaemon foresees, can go back to her family.

  “Confucianists would scream ‘heresy!’” Shuzai’s gaze settles on the urn housing his master’s thumb bone, “but there are times when the less loyal son is the better man.”

  “My ‘commission,’” Uzaemon begins, struggling to articulate himself, “feels less a matter of righting a wrong and more a matter of … of role, of This is what I am for.”

  “Now it is you who sounds like the believer in Fate.”

  “Please make the arrangements for the raid. Whatever the costs, I will pay.”

  Shuzai says, “Yes,” as if there is no other conclusion.

  “Raise your elbow that high,” a sharp-voiced senior disciple in the dojo hall tells a junior, “and one well-aimed uekiri stroke will pound it to rice powder …”

  Shuzai changes the subject. “Where is Jiritsu’s scroll now?”

  Uzaemon resists an urge to touch the scroll tube in an inner pocket. “It is hidden”—if we are captured, he thinks, better not to know the truth—“under the floor of my father’s library.”

  “Good. Keep it there for now.” Shuzai rolls up his own drawing of the Shiranui Shrine. “But bring it when we leave for Kyôga. If all goes well, you and Miss Aibagawa will vanish like two drops of rain, but if Enomoto ever tracks you down, that manuscript could be your sole means of defense. I said earlier that the monks pose little danger; I cannot say the same for the lord abbot’s vengeance.”

  “Thank you,” Uzaemon says, and rises, “for your wise advice.”

  JACOB DE ZOET EMPTIES the hot water into a cup and stirs in a spoonful of honey. “I had the same cold last week. Sore throat, headache, and I’m still croaking like a frog. During July and
August, my body forgot what cold weather felt like—quite a feat for a Zeelander. But now it’s that blistering summer heat I can’t remember.”

  Uzaemon misses some words. “Memory is tricks and strangeness.”

  “That’s the truth.” De Zoet adds a dash of pale juice. “And this is lime.”

  “Your room,” observes the visitor, “is change.” Additions include the low table and cushions, a New Year’s kadomatsu pine wreath, a competent picture of a monkey drawn in pen and ink, and a folding screen to hide De Zoet’s bed. Which Orito might have shared—Uzaemon suffers a complicated ache—and better that she had. The head clerk has no slave or servant, but the apartment is tidy and swept. “Room is comfort and pleasant.”

  De Zoet stirs the drink. “Dejima is to be my home for some years.”

  “You do not wish to take a wife for more comfort life?”

  “I don’t view such transactions as lightly as do my compatriots.”

  Uzaemon is encouraged. “Picture of monkey is very beauty.”

  “That? Thank you, but I’m an incurable beginner.”

  Uzaemon’s surprise is genuine. “You draw monkey, Mr. de Zoet?”

  De Zoet replies with an embarrassed smile and serves the lime-and-honey drink. He then flouts the laws of small talk. “How may I be of service, Ogawa-san?”

  Uzaemon looks at the steam rising from the bowl. “I am disturb your office at important period, I fear.”

  “Deputy Fischer exaggerates. There isn’t much to be done.”

  “Then …” The interpreter touches the hot porcelain with his fingertips. “I wish Mr. de Zoet keep—to hide—a … a very important thing, safe.”

  “If you wish to use one of our warehouses, perhaps Chief van Cleef should—”

  “No no. This is small thing.” Uzaemon produces the dogwood scroll tube.

  De Zoet frowns at the item. “I shall oblige, of course, and gladly.”

  “I know Mr. de Zoet is able to hide items with greatest care.”

  “I shall hide it with my Book of Psalms, until you want it back.”