Blood of Tyrants (3 page)

A
NOTHER FULL DAY PASSED
in sleep and eating restored Laurence to nearly all the outward semblances of comfort, and robbed him more with every passing minute of the inward: he could not conceive of any course which should have deposited him so unceremoniously on the highways of Japan. He could not even be grateful to find himself equipped, apparently by the hand of deity, with the Chinese language to hand: he would have preferred to have been made mute, and known in the confines of his own mind whence he came, even if he could not have communicated that knowledge to his captors.

And captors they certainly were: his request for transport to Nagasaki remained notably unanswered. He had learnt a little more of his situation from Junichiro, who had despite his earlier flash of resentment continued to wait upon him punctiliously. His host’s name was Kaneko Hiromasa; his exact rank Laurence could not entirely work out, but he was at the least a reasonably wealthy man of some position, if judged by the size of his house and the number of servants, and engaged on important affairs by the quantity of papers in his study. A country-gentleman, managing his own estates, or perhaps even an official of some sort. Regardless of his rank, however, it was increasingly plain he did not view Laurence as a mere subject of charity, to be fed and washed and sent on his way.

Laurence had not been able to marshal his resources to pursue
the matter on the previous day. Confusion and illness had overcome him, and he had spent nearly all the day asleep, stretched his full length upon the bare mats of the floor, rousing only for dinner. But in the morning he awakened feeling himself again, in body at least; and when the servants came with breakfast, he made plain he wished to speak with Kaneko once again. The ordinary maids did not speak Chinese, but when he had repeated their master’s name, they went away, and brought Junichiro back with them.

That young man came to the chamber door and stood outside, his face hard and remote. “My master is presently occupied,” he said. “Permit me to address your needs.” His voice was flat, and he did not look Laurence in the face. There was a strange mingling of formality and palpable resentment in his manner: all the outward shows of courtesy, and no evidence of any real feeling which might have motivated it.

Laurence could not make sense of it. If his presence had meant some great burden for the household, he might better have understood, but Kaneko need not have picked him up from the ground if so, and in any case the largesse which had been shown him, so far, scarcely seemed of a kind which would have troubled the finances of such a house.

But a full understanding was not his present concern: the meat of the matter was that they did not mean to aid him to get back to his ship. “I remain grateful for your master’s hospitality,” he said, “but my health is recovered, and I will trespass on it no further: I would ask you for the return of my clothing, and my sword, and to show me the way to the road.”

Junichiro looked at him with an expression briefly startled, as though Laurence had asked him for a pair of wings. “What would you do?” he said, with sincere confusion. “You cannot speak the language; you are a foreigner and a barbarian—”

“And,” Laurence said, cutting him off short; he could not have said how he knew the word had the flavor of an insult, but he did, “if I mean to go to the devil, that is my business, and surely no concern of yours.”

He would indeed have been glad of help, but not of the sort which would keep him penned in a room and plied with food and drink. So far, he seemed to figure at once as an unexpected but welcome guest, and a piece of highly inconvenient baggage: Junichiro plainly wished him gone—or never come at all—but even the servants eyed him with sidelong worried looks that required no translation.

At the very least, Laurence hoped his demand to leave might draw out some response which should illuminate matters, and let him know how better to proceed: and indeed Junichiro hesitated; he left and in a little while returned and said, “My master will see you.”

Laurence hoped to make a better show of himself, at this second meeting; he had asked for a razor, and conquered the disquiet of looking at his strangely unfamiliar face in the glass long enough to clear away the several days’ growth of beard. The servants had brought him to a bathing room, peculiarly divided with a wooden-slatted floor on which they insisted on scrubbing him in the open air, surely unhealthy in the extreme and inviting a chill, before permitting him to step into the large bath, itself excessively hot; at least, he had thought it so, but on emerging he could not deny it had done splendidly to ease his aches.

When ushered into the office this time, he was able to fold himself down in a better imitation of what was evidently the polite kneeling posture; his legs still complained of the position, but he was not so weak he was at every moment in danger of tipping over and having to reach out a hand to steady himself awkwardly against the floor with his fingertips.

Kaneko was frowning, however: Laurence’s sword lay on the desk before him, unsheathed, and in the sunlight coming through the open window looked even more splendid than Laurence had recalled: jewels gleamed from the dragon’s-head of the hilt, and the blade shone. His fingers itched to hold it again. “Where did you have this from?” Kaneko asked, touching the hilt.

Laurence could not bring himself to make the fantastic if honest
answer that he did not recall: in any event, he did not feel himself compelled to answer such a question, personal and unjustified. “Are you proposing, sir,” he said, “that I have stolen it? The sword is mine, as are the coat, the shirt, and the trousers you found upon me; I am sorry to be equally unable to provide you with the bills of sale for any of them, if you should require the same to restore them to me.”

Kaneko hesitated. “This is a very fine blade,” he said, finally.

He seemed to want something more, but Laurence could not provide it. “Yes,” he said, unyielding, as he could not be otherwise. “I am a serving-officer of His Majesty’s Navy, sir; I rely upon my sword.”

He waited; he did not entirely understand what concerned Kaneko so about the blade. Finally, Kaneko said bluntly, “It is of Chinese make,” and Laurence inwardly flinched not with surprise, but with the absence of surprise: he realized he knew as much, and had not even thought it strange, before.

“I have another of Spanish,” Laurence said, swallowing his confusion, “and one of Prussian. Do you mean to keep it?”

Junichiro twitched as if with indignation, but Kaneko did not answer, only looking down still at the sword: Laurence had an impression he was dissatisfied with the answer, but why he should have cared where the sword had come from, Laurence could not say. “If not,” he added, “I would be glad for its return.”

“Ah,” Kaneko said, and tapped his fingers once upon the desk, before stilling his hand. “The bakufu has directed that only a samurai may bear a long sword.”

“If that is, as I suppose, a knight,” Laurence said, “I am the third son of the Earl of Allendale and, as I have already said, a ship’s captain: I must consider both my birth and my rank adequate to my arms by any reasonable standard. I will speak plainly, sir: if you mean to pillage me, I should be hard-put to prevent you under the circumstances, but I will thank you not to dress it up with justifications as ungentlemanly as they are unwarranted.”

“How dare you speak so to my master?” Junichiro flared up, half-rising on his knees. “You should have died, but for his intervention—”

“I did not request your aid,” Laurence said flatly, to Kaneko rather than to his squire, “and should rather have had none of it than a pretense at the same: I consider it no favor to be fed and clothed, and held against my will. If you are making yourself my jailor, sir, I should care to know on what grounds I am to meet with such treatment. So far as I know there is peace between our nations, and a shipwreck has in every civilized society all the claims to human sympathy which any man should care to receive, himself being the victim of such a disaster.”

“One who breaks the law may desire sympathy and yet not deserve it!” Junichiro said, and then subsided: Kaneko had raised his hand a very little.

“If a man may break the laws of your nation merely by being hurled unwillingly upon your shore,” Laurence said dryly, “then they seek to constrain not the will of man, but of God.”

“Enough, Junichiro,” Kaneko said quietly, when the young man would have answered hotly again. “The objection is just: I have not been of true service to you, as I vowed to be.”

He sat in silence a moment, looking down at his desk, while Laurence wondered at
vowed:
he had done nothing to earn any promise of service himself; was Kaneko under some sort of religious obligation?

“The obligations of honor are many,” Kaneko said at last, “and often contradictory.”

Junichiro made a violent motion of protest, a hand chopped across the air, outstretched as if he meant to catch the words even being spoken. Kaneko glanced at him, and with affection but sternly said, “Enough, Junichiro.”

“Master,” Junichiro said, “not for
this
. Not—”

Laurence watched them, disturbed: the young man’s voice was breaking, though Kaneko seemed as placid as a lake; he felt abruptly
as awkward as though he had wandered into a stranger’s house, and found it full of family quarrels addressed only obliquely, through hints.

“I must write to Lady Arikawa,” Kaneko said, “and offer her my apologies. I see now that I have acted wrongly: I did not have the right to undertake an oath which might expose her to charges of disobedience to the bakufu. I regret that you must endure a delay in my answer,” he added to Laurence. “It must be her will, and not mine, whether I am permitted to fulfill my vow with honor by offering you assistance, and then make her my amends.”

“Pray Heaven she commands otherwise,” Junichiro said.

“You will desire no such thing,” Kaneko said, sharply, and after a moment, the young man looked away and muttered, “No.”

Kaneko nodded once, and then dismissed them both silently but pointedly by returning his attention to his writing-work as thoroughly as if he had been alone in the chamber.

Laurence hesitated, but the decision seemed made: he followed Junichiro’s shoulders, hunched forward a little as though he still felt his master’s reproof, back through the corridors to his own chamber. “I should like my own clothing again, at least,” he said abruptly, when they had reached the small room, and he had stepped inside, “if there is no objection to that.”

“If you wish to look like a ragged beggar, I suppose it can be accomplished,” Junichiro said, savagely, and closed the wall-panel behind him. But Laurence for the moment was as glad to be shut in with his own thoughts.

It seemed plain that the law here was inhospitable in the extreme to foreigners, and only some kind of vow—now-regretted—had impelled Kaneko to undertake the forms of charity towards him, evidently at real risk of his own disgrace. This Lady Arikawa, whoever she might be—perhaps his liege, certainly a person of authority—would be under no similar constraint. Kaneko might wish to leave his fate to the will of this lady, and so propitiate her, but Laurence felt not the slightest inclination to accommodate his
plans. If return he owed, for hospitality so unwillingly given, then removing himself from the situation was all the return he was prepared to make.

The house was large, but hardly fortified, and he had seen only a few manservants. If the law generally barred the possession of blades, his own lack might not be an insurmountable obstacle if he could not get at the sword; although that, too, might be accomplished. The chief difficulty was not an escape, he thought, but its sequel. He could with an effort summon up the shape of the nation, on a chart, but he had never sailed this way in his life. If he had been asked to find Nagasaki by latitude and longitude, from memory, he might as well have made for Perdition straightaway.

But with any luck he could find his way back to the coast, whence perhaps some fisherman might be prevailed upon to carry him in secret to the port: and if he had not dreamt it in his delirium, the buttons of his coat had been gold. If not, in any case there might be a few coins in a pocket, or slipped through into the lining, if his things had not been pillaged.

They had not. Junichiro returned only a little while later with a servant trailing him, who set down on the floor just inside the room the bundle of clothing. And when the door had closed, and Laurence held the salt-stained and ruined clothes, he found the buttons, still firmly sewn on, were gold; and so, too, were the long narrow bars athwart each shoulder where the epaulettes had ought to be—

—and the coat itself was an aviator’s green.

The first order of business was plainly to get the ship afloat again: a ship sitting on rocks was of no use to anyone. “But shan’t the ocean get in, once those are underwater?” Lily said, her head tilted to examine the gaping holes where the rocks had pierced the hull and yet stood within, keeping the
Potentate
fixed upon the shoals.

“Oh! by no means,” Temeraire said. “They will patch it, with
some timber and oakum, I believe; or perhaps with something else, it makes not a particle of difference. That is not
our
affair: that is for the sailors to worry about.”

He spoke with impatience, which he was aware Lily did not deserve, but he could not quite help himself. It was so very hard to stay here, especially when he was forced to overhear the officers, who insisted on speaking to one another in the certainty of Laurence’s death; even Granby, of whom Temeraire would have expected better, had only said to Hammond, “For Heaven’s sake, Hammond, let him think as he likes. It will take him dreadfully, when he
does
believe it.”

“Well, I am
not
going to believe it, so there,” Temeraire said, to himself; but it certainly did not improve his already-great anxiety to be away, searching for Laurence; and neither did Churki sitting there like a great unhelpful lump and wagging her head seriously and saying, “This is what comes of putting all your heart in just one person! Hammond, I should have mentioned before, I hope
you
are thinking of marriage, and do not fear that I am inclined to be unreasonable. As long as she is young enough to have a great many children, I will be very pleased, whatever your choice.”