1636: Seas of Fortune (59 page)

“It is great in area, and perhaps in potential, but for now, its population and productivity are small, and so they will remain for many years to come.”

“Perhaps. I am willing to defer to my colleagues and support the continuation of the
kirishitan
emigration, and of Date Masamune’s governorship—on two conditions.”

Shigetsuna stared at Lord Hotta. “And what might those be?”

“First, I understand that you have plans to mine iron on this Texada Island. I want that island to be settled, and the iron controlled, by Buddhists of my choosing. That way, if worst comes to worst, the king of Spain does not gain an iron mine.”

“Your Buddhists, but still under the governorship of Date Masamune? I suppose my lord might accept that. Although I cannot make a commitment without discussing the issue with him. And provision would have to be made for any
kirishitan
already on Texada. What is your second condition?”

“Half the jade you find is consigned for sale to the trading house I select.”

* * *

Date Masamune eyed her speculatively. “First-to-Dance, you have been your tribe’s emissary to New Nippon for some months now. It is perhaps time to take your role as emissary to the next level.”

She cocked her head. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“The shogun, the ruler of Japan, wants to meet an Indian. Two Indians, a male and a female, actually. Think about whether you would like to be the female.”

* * *

Chiyo bowed to the lord commissioners, seated on the dais beside her father, and recited a
tanka
composed by Princess Nukata a thousand years earlier. When she finished, she bowed again, and they clapped politely.

“Next,” said Shigetsuna, “we have a Young Arithmetical Sage to amaze us.”

Hiraku stood up. And froze.

Shigetsuna rescued him. “If I may ask each of our esteemed guests to name a three digit number . . .” They did so. “Young Hiraku, what is their sum?”

He answered.

The demonstration proceeded from there to multiplication, division, and extraction of roots.

Finally, Shigetsuna called for a table to be brought out, and on it an assistant laid out a counting board, essentially a rectangular grid. Beside it, the assistant placed a bag of sangi, the red-positive and black-negative counting rods.

Shigetsuna posed this problem to Hiraku: “Suppose five large containers and one small container together hold three koku of rice, while one of the large and five of the small containers together hold only two koku. Show me what is the capacity of the large and small containers.”

It was one of the classic problems from the ninth chapter of the
Chiu-Chang Suan Chu
, written during the Han dynasty. Hiraku could not read Chinese, of course, but Shigetsuna had personally taught Hiraku the method.

Hiraku arranged the
sangi
on the board: one and five, five and one, and two and three. He then multiplied and subtracted several times. When he was done, he had zero and one hundred twenty, twenty-four and zero, seven and sixty-five.

“The small container holds seven twenty-fourths of a koku, and the large one, thirteen twenty-fourths.”

Shigetsuna cleared his throat. “The answer is . . . Correct! Thank you, Hiraku.”

“And now Date Iroha-hime will play for us on the
koto
.”

* * *

Lord Commissioner Sakai coughed. “That merchant’s boy—Hirako, is it?”

Date Masamune reluctantly corrected him. “Hiraku.”

“He is quite bright. A crane in a flock of fowls, neh?”

“I am not so sure,” said Masamune. “His father has a head for numbers, too.”

A servant shuffled by. “Some wine, my lords?” The Japanese of California didn’t have sake, because of the problems they had experienced cultivating rice, but they did have wine made from the wild grape of California.

After his cup was refilled, the lord commissioner pressed his point. “Large fish should not live in a small pond. The boy should be in Japan, where he can sit at the feet of the greatest of scholars.”

“Perhaps. But how is that possible? He is the son of a merchant, and he is a
kirishitan
.”

“Easily solved. I will adopt him into my own family! He will then be a samurai, and of of course he will become a Buddhist and thus can reenter Japan.”

Date Masamune, a father himself, was silent for a moment. “You do him a great honor. But please, do not speak of this publicly yet, I must make proper investigation of the boy’s genealogy, and whether he was born under auspicious stars. My astrologer will need your birth sign, too, to make sure you’re compatible.”

Lord Sakai guffawed. “You sound like an old go-between, warning the family elders that they need to find out more about the bride they’ve been offered. But do what you think necessary.”

* * *

A messenger brought Lord Sakai’s offer to Hiraku’s parents, and Takuma and Mizuchi stared at each other.

“What do we do now?” Mizuchi asked, wringing her hands. “He’s only nine years old. If we hadn’t left Nagasaki, it would be another year or two before he would start an apprenticeship.”

“We must admit that is a far better opportunity then any possible apprenticeship. And if he did start an apprenticeship, you know that he wouldn’t be allowed to visit home for five years.”

“Yes, but we could come to see him. And when his apprenticeship was done, he could return home and help you.” She held her hand to her mouth. “You realize . . . you realize that we would never see him again! We are exiles, remember.”

Takuma pondered this. “I want . . . we want . . . what’s best for Hiraku, but to never see him again, yes that would be hard to bear. But couldn’t he come to see us?”

Mizuchi picked at her kimono. “I suppose. But the journey across the Great Sea is dangerous. And would he be allowed to return here for good? To see him for a few months, a decade from now—I think it would break my heart.”

“And then there’s the religious issue,” Takuma reminded her.

“Yes, in Lord Sakai’s house, he could not be a Christian. And if he does not remain in the Faith, he is damned.”

“So . . . we refuse?” she asked hopefully. “With extreme apologies, of course?”

Takuma fidgeted. “I wish I was sure the decision is ours alone. If we displease Lord Sakai, what will happen to us? Not just our family, but to all of us?” Takuma was now a respected if junior member of Shigetsuna’s staff; he had heard the rumors that the lord commissioners had power to cut off the colonists’ umbilical cord back to the motherland. What would the grand governor do if Lord Sakai was angry? Hiraku might be taken from them, even without their consent. The three of them might be sent off to the cinnabar mine, or forced to leave and live, if they could, with the wilderness Indians. And their friends could be made to suffer on account of their refusal.

They talked about it for hours. If only they had not lost Takuma’s father. They needed his counsel now. They opened the
butsudan
, and burned incense before it. Even as they prayed for his guidance, they despaired. More than forty-nine days had passed, and so he was no longer merely a spirit of the dead, a
shrei
, he was a
niisenzo
, a new ancestor. But it would be thirty-three years before he was a full ancestral spirit, a
sorei
.

They could, in theory, pray to the
sorei
of earlier generations. But they were Buddhists; only Takama’s father had been a
kirishitan
, and thus likely to be sympathetic to their plight.

They prayed, also, for the intercession of
Maruya-sama
, the Virgin Mary. She had refused to marry the king of Roson, according to the stories they had heard; perhaps she would reveal to the Yamaguchis how they could safely refuse the commissioner’s offer to adopt Hiraku.

The next morning, Mizuchi told her husband, “
Maruya-sama
came to me in a vision, she said to speak to Iroha-hime, the grand governor’s daughter.”

* * *

Iroha heard them out, then gave them her opinion. “I will not say whether this adoption is a good thing or a bad one, only how it might be prevented without dangerous repercussions.

“By itself, the fact that your son has been raised as a Christian is not likely to be considered a strong enough objection.”

“To take him out of the Church will doom him to hell!”

Iroha-hime sighed. “That’s not how the lord commissioner will see it. You know the proverb; ‘there are many paths up the Mountain, but the view of the Moon from the top is the same.’ Lord Sakai thus would not think it consequential to ask Hiraku to change from one Buddhist sect to another. And considering that Christianity is now labeled ‘the evil religion,’ he may think he is doing your son a favor to lead him back to Buddhism, whichever temple he chooses.

“But I think it helpful that you are not a mere Christian follower, you are a baptizer. A member of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, neh? And so we can remind the lord commissioner that many of the Shinto priestly posts are hereditary.”

“What of it? I am not a priest! And the Christian priesthood is not hereditary. Why, the priests don’t even marry!”

“Those are details we need not trouble the lord commissioner with. And besides, from what I have heard, it is not unusual among the European nobility for the second son of each generation to enter the priesthood. That makes it hereditary in a practical sense, I think.

“Anyway, he cannot interfere with the normal inheritance of priestly positions without the approval of the commissioner of Temples and Shrines. Who is, alas, an ocean away.”

Takuma and Mizuki relaxed, ever so slightly.

“And I think there is a second string we can fit to this bow. There is the matter of filial piety. He is your only child, who else is there to care for you in your old age?

“Let me speak with your son; I must coach him as to exactly what to say.”

* * *

Hiraku bowed deeply. “Most Honorable Lord Commissioner,” he piped. “I have spent hours in prayer and meditation, seeking to understand whether it is the will of Heaven that I accompany you back to Japan.” He declined to mention whether he had the Christian or Buddhist Heaven in mind.

“I must consider, not only what is best for me, but what is best for my family and my community.”

The lord commissioner nodded in approval.

“Greatly though I would value the opportunity to accompany you across the Great Ocean, I must remember the teachings of Confucius: ‘If your parents are living, don’t go on a long trip.’

“Also, eager though I am to sit at the feet of the great mathematicians of the realm, I must consider it my duty to put my poor skills at work where they are most needed, in this New Nippon, an island in a sea of, of . . .”

Iroha mouthed the word he was looking for.

“. . . barbarism. Not only as a mathematician, but also as a keeper of the sacred water, like my father before me.” Shinto also had water purification rituals, and this, Iroha-hime knew, would logically call to the lord commissioner’s mind the practices of Shintoism, including priestly inheritance.

Hiraku took a breath. “Moreover, I have not accomplished any great feats of mathematics yet; I am still unworthy to be adopted by so great a lord. Instead, I ask that I be permitted the honor of incorporating a single
kanji
of your name into my own.” This was common enough, actually. Japanese changed their names on certain occasions; for example, when a samurai child became an adult, usually at age fifteen, he would take an adult name, which included a character from the name of his father or godfather.

Hiraku bowed again.

“Well, that was well spoken,” the lord commissioner said. “If that is truly what you want . . .”

* * *

First-to-Dance reached for another mallard feather. She hummed as she carefully inserted the feather between the stitches of the basket she was finishing. It had to stick out enough so that the colors could be seen, but not so much that it would tear out easily.

She had no need to make baskets, of course; her Japanese connections had assured her access to premium trade goods, and by Ohlone standards she was extremely prosperous. She had even been courted by the eldest son of a chief of the Uypi, who lived on Soquel Creek, near Kodachi Machi/Santa Cruz. But unfortunately for him, her aspirations had changed.

So. Japan. Should she go? The sea journey would be long and frightening, of that she was certain. But Lord Commissioner Sakai, the friendly one, had promised that if she came, he would look after her as if she were his own daughter.

Chiyo had told her that she had been described to the lord commissioner as being an “Indian princess,” and to say nothing to contradict that. The higher her assumed status, the better she would be treated.

Was it worth it? It would bring her to the very center of power, Edo Castle itself. The contacts she would make! The advantages it would give her people! The profits it could bring her! It made her head spin, just thinking about it.

But wait a minute. She knew from discussions with Chiyo and her other Japanese female friends that Japanese women were expected to be seen but not heard. In public, at least. That would make it rather difficult for her to make any deals.

Unless . . . Unless she picked the male Indian. One who was impressive to look at, easy to push around, and spoke no Japanese whatsoever. Or at least willing to pretend that he didn’t. So she would be his “translator.” She smiled. He would babble something, and she would say whatever needed to be said.

She would miss Toshiro Kanesada, of course. But it wasn’t as though there weren’t plenty of samurai in Japan!

Chiyo had warned her to expect to be exhibited to the shogun’s other guests as an exotic discovery. She didn’t mind that, either, within reason. As long as the shogun didn’t decide to make her a permanent part of his menagerie. Chiyo’s father would, of course, obliquely and delicately remind the shogun’s councillors of the diplomatic importance of permitting her to return, but the shogun’s whim was still law. So there was an irreducible risk.

Still, life was full of risks.

First-to-Dance looked at her basket. It was made in the traditional way, from woven shoots and roots, dyed in vegetable colors, but it showed a grizzly snarling at a dragon, the latter copied from one of Chiyo’s sake cups. The grizzly was brave and powerful, but she had no doubt that the dragon would prevail if the grizzly insisted on fighting.