Autumn Bridge (18 page)

“A new era is upon us,” the merchant proclaimed from the saddle of his horse, “a new era of great and unprecedented opportunity!”

“Save your lies!” one of the farmers yelled. “We have no money. You can’t trick us out of what we don’t have!”

The villagers laughed. The ones closest to the farmer who had yelled out praised him enthusiastically and loudly shouted out suggestions of their own.

“Move on to Kobayashi Village! They’re much richer there!”

“Yes. At least they have something to steal. We have nothing!”

The merchant smiled as the villagers laughed some more. He withdrew a large cloth bag from inside his jacket and shook it. It made a sound like heavy coins jingling together. Many heavy coins. The laughter quickly died away.

The merchant said, “Would a trickster give you his money, instead of taking yours? Would a liar take your word, instead of asking you to take his?”

“Lead will make a purse as heavy as gold,” a farmer said, “and words are just words. We are not such fools not to know a thief when we see one.”

One of the wave men with the merchant, apparently the leader of the group, moved his horse forward and spoke in the usual arrogant manner of samurai, masterless or not.

“Lower yourself to your proper level, peasant,” he said, his hand on the hilt of his sword, “and speak respectfully to those above you.”

“This is Yamanaka Village,” the farmer said, not intimidated in the least. “We are subjects of Lord Hiromitsu, not homeless rabble.”

The wave man drew his sword. “Lord Hiromitsu. I quiver in fear.”

“Lord Hiromitsu enjoys the friendship of Genji, Great Lord of Akaoka,” the farmer continued, “who crushed the Shogun’s army here not so long ago. Perhaps you have heard of Mushindo Monastery?”

“Mushindo Monastery,” the wave man said, lowering his sword and turning to the merchant. “I thought it was farther west.”

“Turn your head,” the farmer said, “and look up at that hill. There it is.”

“Put away your sword,” the merchant said, “and let us not speak of the past. I am here as an emissary of the future. Of the prosperous future. Will you hear me or not? If not, I will move on.”

He opened the bag, reached in, removed a fistful of coins, and opened his hand. The bag did not hold lead. His palm glittered with
shu
, the rectangular gold coins with the characteristic markings of the official Tokugawa mint. Sixteen shu equaled one ryo, and one ryo was more than even the richest farmer in the village would earn from the year’s harvest. If the merchant’s bag was full of gold shu, he held a fortune in his hands. It was a wonder the ronin with him had not already murdered him and stolen his wealth. The presence of so much money in front of them awed the farmers into silence.

“The Shogun has recently abolished the prohibition against travel abroad,” the merchant declared. “Seeing that the world will benefit from our presence, he has wisely decreed that Japanese may once again reside in foreign lands. To accommodate travelers, many new inns are being established, in Taiwan, the Philippines, Siam, Cochin China, Java, and elsewhere. Naturally, these inns must be staffed by Japanese. We cannot entrust our travelers to the care of uncivilized natives. To this end, I have been authorized to offer employment as maids, cooks, and housekeepers to the young women of your village, for a term of three years, with one shu per year paid to their families. In advance! That is three shu now, today, this very minute, for every family who will give their daughters an opportunity of a lifetime! Three gold shu!”

As soon as she heard the words
three gold shu,
Kimi knew she was as good as already in Java or the Philippines or Siam, wherever those places were. She didn’t believe a word this obvious scoundrel was saying about the Shogun’s proclamation or new opportunities or anything else, and doubted that anyone else in the village really did either. But there was no way impoverished peasants with too many mouths to feed could resist such an offer.

“Now, tell me the truth,” the merchant said, still holding out his palm filled with gold for all to see. “Did you ever think you would live to see the day when a mere dowryless daughter would be worth so much? Truly, are we not living in wondrous times?”

Kimi’s three other sisters were all married, with children too young to abandon. Kimi was the only one who could go. And go she did, that very day, along with six other girls from the village. She didn’t even have time to climb the hill to Mushindo and say good-bye to Goro.

Two weeks later, she was in a warehouse on a pier in the port of Yokohama, waiting, along with a hundred other girls and young women, for a ship that would take them to someplace called Luzon. The fiction about being maids and housekeepers and cooks had been abandoned long before. Many of the older girls had already been raped by their guards, some repeatedly. Kimi and the others had escaped that fate only because the merchant repeatedly reminded the wave men that the youngest girls would bring double the price if they were still virgins when they reached their destination. In the delicate balance between lust and greed, Kimi was temporarily safe. It was, however, a safety devoid of hope. It had finally dawned on her. She had been sold. By her own parents.

For several days, the thought of escape had kept her energy and her spirits up. But that faded away soon enough. To where would she escape? If she went back to the village, the wave men would come for her, and what then would her parents do? They would give her back, because if they did not, they would have to give back the gold, and that was something Kimi could not imagine. She had seen the look in their faces as they held the coins in their hands. And if she didn’t go back to the village, what would she do? How could she survive in a place like Yokohama, teeming with strangers, people as much adrift as the wave men who imprisoned her?

Hopelessness made her dull, and being dull, she lost track of time.

So this was how the rest of her life would be. Vague, hazy, numb. She would be used until she could be used no more, then she would die. What a curse to have been born a woman. If she had been a dog, even a female dog, she would at least have had the protection of the Shogun’s old laws regulating their treatment. There were no laws regulating the treatment of women.

The frightened screams of the girls nearest the entry to their pen woke her up. She moved as far back into the crowd as she could. Because of her value as a virgin, she probably had nothing yet to fear, but it was better not to trust too much in greed. Those prone to vice tended to be unreliable, even in the exercise of vice. A momentary weakness, that’s all it would take, and these wave men were full of weaknesses. Kimi hid.

“That’s right, scream, scream,” one of the guards said as the others laughed. “Frightening, isn’t he? The next troublemaker who doesn’t do as she’s told — right away, and nicely, too — we’ll give to him. How would you like that? You! Yes, you! Who will it be? Him or me?”

Kimi couldn’t see what was happening, but she didn’t have to see to know. She heard laughter, and frightened murmurs, the opening of the gate, the shuffling of feet. The press of the other girls’ bodies against hers told her how frightened they were. They were straining to stay as far away from the gate as possible.

“We’ll leave him here to watch over you,” the guard said. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll behave yourselves while we’re gone, or else!”

The guards left with the unfortunate women they had selected for their evening entertainment, but the press of bodies against Kimi did not diminish. The new man they had left behind must truly be beastly if he compared so badly with the beasts she had already seen. She could tell he was moving along the fence, peering in at them, because the crowd of cowed women shifted first one way, then another, each time with an increased hint of panic. Some of the women had already begun to sob, in anticipation of the horror that would soon, inevitably, be visited upon them. Another shift and she caught a glimpse of him, his huge bald head towering above them. He moved this way and that along the fence, silently, his attention totally fixed on the women. He was some kind of mute, hairless monster, perhaps an outsider, brought in by the heartless wave men to terrorize them and make them obedient slaves.

The gate rattled, gently at first, then violently. The women, gasping, pressed even harder against the far wall. Something metallic snapped. Kimi could see the top of the gate swinging away. The monster was inside. The crowd of women receded as he advanced, and Kimi tried to recede with them. But she was able to do this for only so long, because they were receding away from her as well as the monster.

He was coming for her!

During the past few days, Kimi had thought about suicide, and always decided against it. Life was preferable to death. Alive, she had a chance. Dead, there was nothing at all. Also, there was the practical problem. How? Starvation wouldn’t work. The guards would see what was happening and force her to eat. This had already happened to one girl. Until she saw what the guards did, she didn’t know that eating could be turned into torture.

There was nothing to hang oneself from except the fence, and that was too slow a way to strangle. One of the girls had also tried this method, and only managed to damage the muscles of her neck before she gave up. Now she had a permanent tilt to her head, which lessened her value, and which would undoubtedly consign her to the worst kind of maltreatment in Luzon.

She couldn’t jump from a height or slit her throat. The most she could manage would be to bash her head against the ground so hard, she would fracture her skull. She didn’t think she had either the will or the strength to do that.

That left only one possibility. It was gruesome, but it was also certain death, if she had the courage to do it. She had come close a number of times and always stopped herself. Life was preferable to death. Until now.

The monster loomed ever closer. In the darkness of the pen, she couldn’t make out his features, she could only see the outline of his massive body. He would tear her, he would break her, he would crush her, in the ferocity of his inhuman lust, before he left her to die in agony, wretchedly alone, here on the floor of a warehouse in Yokohama.

She turned away and knelt, her tongue stuck out as far as it would go between her teeth. She would slam her chin down on the ground, sever that mostly troublesome organ, and bleed to death. Such a life, so brief, with the only flicker of brightness brought by the outsider monk Jimbo, a time that seemed so long ago. She closed her eyes and raised her head for her final descent. Her exposed tongue was already so dry it felt parched.

“Kimi,” the monster said.

“Goro,” said the Reverend Abbess Jintoku.

“Kimi,” the Holy One said.

“Goro.”

“Kimi.”

“Goro.”

“Kimi.”

The repetition of names could go on for a very long time. The Abbess had come to think of it as a form of chanting and on occasion, quite unintentionally and without her notice, would enter a deep state of meditation. Sometimes he would still be there when she returned to normal consciousness. At other times, he would have gone elsewhere, maintaining Jimbo’s schedule without relaxation. Once, she had awakened in a pouring rain with an acolyte sheltering her with an umbrella. She had, of course, been sent there by the Holy One.

Until the day Goro found her in Yokohama, he had never spoken her name. Now, twenty years later, his vocabulary was still confined to two words.
Jimbo
.
Kimi
. How had he found her? She didn’t know. How had he come to be employed by the wave men as a guard? She didn’t know.

“Kimi,” he said, and took her hand and led her out of the pen, off the pier, through Yokohama, and back to Mushindo. He was a person who regularly got lost walking from the village to the monastery, which was in plain sight. How had he traveled so far, and how did he then so easily find his way back? She didn’t know.

Most of the imprisoned women were too afraid to follow, but a few did. Several of them were still at Mushindo today. There was no pursuit. Why? She didn’t know. She never saw the merchant or the wave men again.

The Abbess blinked.

Goro was gone.

Ah, how long had she stood here by herself, lost in her thoughts of the past? She looked up into the sky. It was well past midday. The tour was long over, the overtly monastic meal served and eaten, the guests gone. She left the caretaker’s compound and returned to the abbey, where she would tally the day’s receipts. In addition to the income from donations for the tour, there were the offerings left in the meditation hall for the Buddhas, in the kitchen for the meal, and in the rectory for the holy relics of charred wood, bullets, and scroll fragments.

The charred wood came from the ruins of the meditation hall that remained after it was blown up in the famous battle. This was most popular with supplicants who believed the fragments had the power to cause a similarly explosive awakening into enlightenment. Those seeking protection from physical danger as well as the evil intentions of enemies favored the bullets as a talisman. After all, thousands had been fired at Lord Genji, and none had hit him. Surely these bullets had absorbed some of his power to ward off attack.

But the income from everything else paled in comparison to the donations the abbey received from those who must have a piece of the scrolls. Some who sought the shreds of paper were certain they were the remnants of the
Cloud of Sparrows
scrolls, the revelations by prescient Okumichi lords of things to come. Possess a piece of it, and your future would tend to attract all good and repel all evil. Others had no doubt of even greater power contained therein, the power to grant one’s most deeply held desires, because the paper was the earthly remains of the
Autumn Bridge
scrolls, the collection of spells and incantations compiled by the princess witch of ancient times, Lady Shizuka.

The Abbess did not make any such claims, nor did she discourage belief in them. The bullets were in fact the bullets that had been fired in the battle and collected by Goro during the cleanup. The wood came from the ruins of the old meditation hall, as people believed. The paper fragments were pieces torn by the Abbess from ancient blank scrolls, originally twelve in number, donated to the abbey by Lady Emily some fifteen years ago. What those scrolls were supposed to be, the Abbess didn’t know, and she didn’t particularly care. The important thing was that Mushindo Abbey produced sufficient income to support its residents and their families. Let people believe what they would, if it gave them some measure of comfort and peace. The world had little enough of both.