Mary Gentle (14 page)
Authors: A Sundial in a Grave-1610
Tanaka Saburo grunted. I didn’t look at him.
I face the same decision with Dariole as with Tanaka Saburo: either she must be dead, or she must leave the country inside the next hour.
Saburo spoke abruptly. “I will take you both as ronin. I owe you both my life. More: because you give me my life, I can complete my lord’s wishes. I have no—resources. Let me help in the way that I can.”
“I thank you, but—”
Dariole cut me off. “What’s a ronin, messire?”
“A man without a lord, who takes service with his sword here and there, for a day or a season, and then moves on. A wave of the sea.” He squinted at the water, then back at her. “You will have your own lord, and I don’t expect loyalty above your loyalty to him. A man must serve his rightful lord in all things.”
A certain amount of cold sweat went down my back, under my wet shirt. I kept my face without expression, which a man learns to do in the Duc de Sully’s service.
“On that basis, I will be a ronin, messire,” I said. “I intend to discover from men I know in London how my lord the Duc de Sully is, what’s happening in Paris at the court, and what the Queen Regent Marie de Medici is doing. If those matters do not interfere with your mission?”
I already knew they did not: I was confident enough of his expression while I named names to read that he did not know much of the French court, and possibly cared nothing either.
“I know not them.” Saburo gave a scowl, but continued to sound contemplative. “I am grateful to be able to offer help, no matter is small. If the Emperor-King English gives me gifts, you will not lack.”
“The English King is a notorious tight-fist. Don’t thank me, monsieur. To speak the absolute truth, Messire—Mademoiselle—Dariole is the one who rescued you. I merely helped after the event.”
Saburo patted his belly. “I remember!” He pointed at the remaining bodies. “We were help to each other—
all
other, I think. There are omens. We are favoured together. Fated. Let’s not break the temper of the gods by leaving here separately. Your lord’s enemies not far off, I think.”
“Then we should take the ship, there, and go.”
“Is sea?” His dark eyes opened roundly. “Cannot go land road?”
“There is none.” Moved by an unexpected impulse, I added, “I will be honest with you. My master the Duke likely has little or no power now. His enemy the Queen Regent rules this country with a council of other lords. I…Monsieur, I intend to make her rule…uneasy. Her grasp on power is not as secure as her husband’s was. She has committed crimes. I warn you: she has men who will travel to
Before Saburo could speak, Dariole broke in.
“Not running for the New World, then, Rochefort?”
“I am done with running.”
Something of emotion must have come out in my tone. She looked as startled as in the town square at Poissy. I reached and took the stallion’s reins from her.
“After these last few yards.” I pointed, with grim humour, at the offshore vessel. “
Then
I am done with running. M. Saburo, I confess, in your company, any traveller’s eye will usefully fall on you, and not on your two—ronin. For the rest….”
I paused, looking at his face, and then at the young woman. She was in everything but truth a young man still. Tanaka Saburo stood with an aloof dignity, for all his wet clothes. The sea-wind made him start to shiver.
“For the rest,” I said, “and since I suppose both of you as near destitute as makes no difference…. The Queen Regent’s agents will soon be warned that something has gone wrong here. Therefore, I cannot wait for the ship to come in on the tide. I must be rowed out to her now. Therefore—I cannot take my Andalusian jennet. It’s as well he’s a deceptive good horse, and worth a fair price.”
Though not a man in this town could truly afford him
.
It had not cost me a pang to walk out on my lodgings in Paris. The dun Andalusian jennet…he, for lack of a tongue, is a better servant to me than Gabriel Santon.
And I am leaving both of them at the mercy of chance, now
.
“I cannot leave witnesses.” I added, “Consider…that your ship’s passage to London is paid.”
The Nihonese man squatly bowed. “I owe you giri.”
“Paid?” Dariole wiped her short hair back out of her face, trying to tug the folds of her ruff into some semblance of order, with a duelist’s care for personal appearance. She scowled. “I’ll pay
that
back. Don’t think I won’t. Cards, or dice. Or—better still, I’ll play you, on the trip! Then your notes of hand will pay my fare!”
She bounded off.
Beside me, the samurai said delicately, “She is not your sword-tutor. Nor your lady-lord. Your master?”
“Neither.”
“And you are not
her
lord-sama.” He sighed, as I notice he had begun to, before a direct question, as if he did not like to use them. “What is she, Rosh’-fu’-san?”
“A devil!” I bit down on the word.
“Ah.” He nodded twice. “In my country, we have a kami, a spirit, who witches men. She is called kitsune, the Fox-Ghost. Men die of her obsession with them. Most often, die when she leaves them.”
“Do you believe in ghosts, messire?” I thought it a reasonable thing to ask.
“A man can be thralled. I have seen that.” He shrugged. “The black-crow priests say kitsune are heretic pagan lies. You a follower of them?”
“Black-crow?”
“The Espaniards.” He lifted his squat neck, looking up at me. “You have their face. Dark. They preach their executed criminal god in my land. Christus.”
It was a moment or two before I understood his pronunciation.
“I don’t think you need worry about my relations with Mother
Church,” I murmured.
“Hai.” He nodded towards Dariole, where she had stopped to pick up pebbles and skim them with a boy’s vigour at the waves, when she should be emptying purses. “She is your Fox-Ghost. No?”
“She is a child!”
It was less than true: women wed at a younger age than hers.
“How did you—” I broke off again. “Is it so obvious? To you? That she’s a woman under her breeches, and I….”
“No man is so angry over a woman without killing her unless his inkei is busy with his thinking. You are beyond reason with her. If I have the right word, of the priests, you are passionate.”
Between the passion of a man and women in sexual congress, and the passion of Christ, bleeding in pain, I had not necessarily seen a connection, until now.
The unnaturalness of this stranger’s face eased the outrage of his daring to make comment on my life, almost as if he were the demon Dariole called him.
“A well-chosen word, ‘passion,’” I said grimly. “As is ‘thrall.’ And we will leave the matter now, Messire Saburo, which if it were not for these extraordinary circumstances, we would never have spoken of.”
The dun Andalusian stone horse nibbled at my shoulder, letting out the long sigh of a mount in the company of a man he trusts. I reached up automatically to rub him under his velvet jaw. He gave me a shove with his head; only a hint of the power of his muscles, all that strength concealed.
“Let’s to London. The woman can go to her relatives; I’ll point you a way to King James; and on the way we can pray that the wrong man isn’t looking my way at the wrong time….”
Saburo looked toward the sea, and the fine fretwork of sun on it as the haze began to lift. “If I could write a poem, I would have write something for my men. They were brave and honourable and deserve a shrine. They were ashigaru. They died far from home.”
They may not be the only ones,
I reflected with mordant humour, as I watched Saburo stomp, wide-legged, down the beach.
He stopped to talk to Mlle Dariole and point at the bodies.
I am relieved that I will not have to kill her.
It came suddenly, and out of nowhere, that wash of warm relief. It was a shock. My hands have not been clean these many years; I may regret my murders on behalf of the state, but I do not feel personal relief when opportunity lets a man live. Or woman, if it comes to that.
I am removing them from the country.
I watched how her chin came up as she threw her head back, laughing in answer to whatever it was the Nihonese man had said.
I can make more use of them alive.
True, judging by the skill of their hands, neither would be quick nor easy to kill. But am I only putting off the decision? And why?
The squat foreign man and the young woman seized each the foot of a man between them. They dragged the last booted corpse down the beach, its weight ploughing ruts in the sand, and Saburo’s grunt came floating back on the sea-wind, and a splutter of surprised laughter from the young woman. I scowled.
Scowled—and caught myself.
If she is pleased to be in his company…what is that to me? To me, of any man on earth?
A twist of coldness went through my belly. The thought came into my mind.
Dear God—I cannot be jealous?
Translator’s Note
This would seem to be the best place to put another of the miscellaneous documents found with Rochefort’s
Memoirs
. The second section of the
Memoirs
follows immediately after.
The
Memoirs
make extremely idiosyncratic use of respectful forms of address (
dono
,
tono
,
hime
, etc.), which may result from a misunderstanding of the language. Therefore, in this translation I’ve substituted the more familiar (if not so authentic) Edo Period
san
and
sama
, to make the narrative more accessible to modern English and Japanese readers.
T
here was one, once, who had the misfortune and bad taste to live past the climatic moment of his life.
The best of deaths was offered to me and I missed it. My lord missed it, also, but had the fortune to die within two years, when some of the gold still clung to him and gave him the shine of glory. Lord Kobayakawa Hideaki. He was two-and-twenty years old when I stood at his grave. I was forty-seven.
The pinnacle of our lives, two years before, had been a battle, and a great one—
the
great battle of our lifetime. When one has had the privilege of fighting with and against all the greatest daimyos of the lands of Nihon, when one has changed the future for all time by a simple and decisive act, what else is left?
At Sekigahara, my lord and I fought. At the crucial moment of the battle, we went over to the side of the Eastern Army and your father, Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu, who by that victory was made Shogun. My lord Hideaki was rewarded with Chikuzen province. I was rewarded by being allowed to accompany him.
We took a part in the last echoes of the war, as the great Shogun subdued outlaw lords and rebels, but it was anti-climactic. My lord wrote poetry on the subject. How a cherry blossom, holding onto the stalk into the heat of June, goes brown and rotten; better if it had fallen in the fullness of its white glory, in May.
I have no place to criticise my lord Hideaki, and if the subject and treatment seemed hackneyed to me, I would have attributed it to his youth and excused it. On the field of battle, he was god-like. At court, among conspiracies, he did not shine. He turned from them, disgusted, spending more time with women, and gambling all night while emptying jug after jug of warm sake.
So death came for him and was timely—an illness, not treachery, so he need fear no dishonour. We interred him when the yellow leaves fell. I passed into the service of his cousin, the new lord of Chikuzen province. So things stayed for six or seven years.
I was a captain of ashigaru, under my lord’s cousin, and no longer the companion of a lord. That was well, I argued to myself at night. What lord wishes an old man as his companion, when that man is not particularly wise, skilled, or devout? Passing into my fifties, I could expect in time to be replaced as captain of the foot soldiers, and I might hope to be retired to a small farm, with servants enough to work while I spent my days overseeing them.
On such nights I would patrol the grounds of my lord’s house—which I could never think of as his cousin’s house. I paced slowly, checking the sentries at odd times, and earning myself their respect and unmalicious dislike. I would walk by the gravel-garden, watching the shifting of the moon’s light on the crags, and smelling the moss and trees growing around the raked expanse. Invariably I would end at the top of one of Chikuzen’s low hills, looking north to the sea, as the sun rose out of the unknown east.
A foolish thing for a samurai to do, you will say. I agree, I concede the point. My fingers were not skilled enough to cast the colours on a scroll, and my poetry, when I attempted it, had nothing of the delicacy of the masters. Perhaps I reached a point of satisfaction when I would strip off my armour and drill with my sword, there in the brightening light, celebrating the coming of the day with the only skill I have.
Whether it was this evidence of individuality that caused my lord’s cousin to choose me, I do not know. He called me to him, ordered me to Edo with a small troop of soldiers, and told me to obey his son in the capital as I would himself. It was an unnecessary slight, but not enough to bring the total to a point where I might cut off the man’s head. He was not worth my own death.
At Edo, I was given a place with the man’s son: we were to go on a ship, and sail for the land of the foreign barbarians. He was to be ambassador. They so often come to us, merchants and priests for the most part: now we were to go to them.
I looked at the sea, when we embarked, and wondered if, on all those mornings, I had been watching my grave.
I was not sorry to leave Nihon. My dead lord Kobayakawa Hideaki rested, I had no obligations there. His successor was unworthy: I did not consider myself obligated to him, either. And
his
son was a man of nothing much in any quality: neither brave nor cowardly, rash nor wise, decisive nor cautious. If I dislike any man, it is the hesitant one who changes his mind according to whomever last spoke to him: a feather for every wind that blows. Such men, daimyo though they may be called, do not have the right to demand the service of honest samurai.
The sea inflicted me with a grave illness from the first hour that we set our sails and left port.
I know, therefore, very little of the first few weeks. By the time I had recovered, we had met with a Dutch ship, and hove-to, to exchange news—that there would be little more trading, as we of Nihon listened more and more to those who said foreigners were malicious and harmful. And there was more. But as I came out of my illness, that was what stayed with me. That here was another point of decision, that I might be part of: keeping Nihon open to the world, or closing it, pure and secret, within itself. What we brought back from the land of the Europeans would sway this, I thought. As decisively as Sekigahara, even.
I worked the ship, in the months that followed, taking time to learn from the ship’s master in the arts of navigation and sailing. It is necessary for a samurai to add to his skills, so that he may be a credit to his lord. I thought my lord Hideaki would have approved. I made sure the escort that I led, as the ambassador’s guard, made regular practise with their weapons on the swaying deck, and led them gladly against pirates when we were twice attacked.
Slowly the world grew hotter, grew colder; coasts appeared like grey ribbons on our horizons and faded away again. The ambassador had no interest in what might lie ashore: we collected food, news, and sailed on. There were lands where men were darker than the aboriginal Ainu of Nihon, and plague came in on every wind. And then one coast, much later, which the ship’s master declared to be Espaine, the home of so many of the black-crow priests. I stared at it over the ship’s rail, not regretting that we would not land there.
By this time, I had with my new lord’s permission acquainted myself with all the languages of Europe that I could. The crew of the ship sufficed to teach me a few words of Dutch and Gaelic, much English, and also much Portuguese, which I understood (mistakenly, perhaps) to be much like Spanish. I puzzled out Latin in a holy book of the black-crow priests, liking less and less what I understood of it; their worship of a criminal who had been given an untouchable’s death, and then became a kami whose place is everywhere and nowhere. The wise man placates spirits, he does not abandon himself to them.
Grey waters, cold mists, heavy wool clothing that we must wear at all times—this was the burden of the next few weeks, while the ship fought to come north, turning and tacking again and again. The winds were against us. I found it more difficult to practise my sword drills on the icy wet deck, and whereas, as a young man, I would have welcomed this challenge, now I drilled with precise efficiency, and could not prevent myself longing for the heat of Chikuzen province.
The seventh or eighth week in those waters, the ship’s master announced to me that we had made the opening of a great channel which had our destination—
I would have cheerfully been received as the lowest of my ashigaru if I could have slept ashore. The sickness that had tormented me after leaving Nihon threatened again. After giving orders for the ashigaru to stand guard as usual on the gifts we had brought for the English Emperor, I went to my place below and attempted to sleep.
I woke to the crash of a rock stoving in the side of the ship.
No man who has been in a wreck ever forgets that moment. I jumped up, cast off my own armour, and made at a run for the cabin where my lord the ambassador kept his gifts. There, I ordered my ashigaru to protect the ambassador with their lives, and I put on one of the gift armours, believing that I could swim in it, were that necessary. I could not tell what to do with the other. For a moment I was near to despair, with men screaming and running, and the sea crashing loudly, and the suck and grind of the breaking ship sounding over it all.
After a few precious seconds had expired, I rolled up the armour plates and stuffed them in a sack, together with the helmet, and tied it all around my waist. That done, and my swords thrust in their scabbards down the front of the armour—which was too big for me—and tied there, I began to climb up to the deck with the intention of jumping into the sea.
Foaming waters broke down the steps as I attempted to mount them.
Holding to the rail with one hand, mouth clamped shut on what air remained, I determined to swim out of the sliding wreck. I had missed one good death. This was no substitute. If I were to die, it would be
after
bringing home the news which was required from the Anghrazi—the Englishmen—and not before.
I lived. But when I woke on the cold, solid sand of the shore, the sea had stripped me of armour and baggage. Unconsciousness took me again as I realised this, in the middle of swearing a vow to any god or kami that might be listening: that I would find the ambassador and whoever remained of my men, and carry out my orders, no matter what. My honour rests on it: there is nothing else that I can do.