The Last Concubine (50 page)

Edwards was waiting in the courtyard. He took off his hat and bowed.

‘Time to go,’ he said, grinning. ‘Bring your travelling hats and tie them on tight.’

They had to push their way through tangles of long grass and weeds and knots of morning glory to get to the gatehouse at the edge of the estate. Cuckoos piped above the incessant shrilling of cicadas. The kind old man who had let the women through when they had gone to the hill was on guard, holding a hefty stave. His face crinkled into a smile as he bowed.

Standing at the gates was the most extraordinary contraption. Sachi stopped, gaping in amazement. She had seen such things in woodblock prints of foreigners in Yokohama, but she had never expected to see one in real life.

She felt a pang of superstitious dread. Nothing but palanquins and horses had ever passed through these ancient gates before, and now here was this foreign contraption. It marked the end of something, something that was important to her.

It was a bit like a giant palanquin on wheels or an oxcart such as farmers used. There was a trunk inside, with some coarse foreign fabric thrown over. It was huge. Even the horses that stood pawing the ground and snorting, beautiful beasts with long manes and glossy coats, were larger than life. Sitting up in front, holding the reins, was another hairy-faced foreigner. He too took off his hat and bowed.

There was also a troop of guards armed with swords and staves, the same men who had accompanied them when they had travelled with Edwards along the Inner Mountain Road. They shuffled their straw-sandalled feet and glanced at her then at each other, exchanging knowing looks. She looked back at them, wishing she could work out who they belonged to, who they reported to. But they turned their eyes away immediately and their crests revealed nothing. She would have to be very careful about what she said in their hearing.

Taki and Haru were standing a safe distance away, squeaking excitedly.

‘
Dozo
,’ said Edwards. ‘Ladies, please, take a seat.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ said Taki, shrinking back – Taki, who was always so brave.

Sachi put her foot on the step. She was about to climb in when Edwards took her hand. She started, feeling the touch of his rough skin on hers. Before she had a chance to pull her hand
away he had lifted her up into the carriage. She stared at him in bemusement. Fancy a man behaving like a servant!

It felt very odd indeed to sit with her legs dangling instead of tucked up beneath her. Edwards helped Taki and Haru too into the carriage and they squeezed in beside her. The carriage rocked a bit. It was not as stable as a palanquin.

The other foreigner – whom Sachi took to be a kind of groom – gave a yell and shook the reins. They lurched into motion, Edwards cantering alongside and the guards running a little way behind. With a great shaking and rattling they rumbled off across the bridge and careered around the corner on to the roadway beside the moat, clattering and bumping along. The earthen road was meant for feet, not wheels.

The city flew by dizzyingly fast. Taki and Haru clung to each other, squealing. Sachi did her best to remain calm and dignified as befitted a lady of the shogun’s court, though she had never in her life travelled faster than walking pace before. Messengers, that sort of person, might go fast, soldiers maybe, but not ladies, especially not the shogun’s ladies and least of all the shogun’s concubine.

But as they bounced along she couldn’t help laughing with excitement. Every time they rounded the smallest curve she was thrown to one side or the other. In the end she grabbed on to Taki and Haru and held on for dear life. She looked out at the world from her high perch, the wind rippling through her hair. Birds must feel like this, she thought, when they fly. Beyond the broad back of the foreigner sitting at the front she caught glimpses of the horses’ heads and flying manes and heard the pounding of their hooves. She had put on a large flat straw hat to protect her face from the sun, wrapping the strings round and round her coiled hair. It flapped alarmingly, threatening to fly off. She clutched at it with one hand to make sure it stayed securely in place.

Then she became aware of what she was seeing and gasped in horror. Across the water the great wall of the moat spun by. Parts had collapsed completely, chunks of granite poked from the water and ragged figures who looked like nothing so much as outcastes lurked in the shadows. There was even a tumbledown shack in one of the gates. The roadway that had always been perfectly
raked and swept was rutted and overgrown with grass and weeds.

They whirled past a bridge. ‘Taki,’ she shouted over the clattering and rumbling, as the wind soughed past their ears. ‘Look. Look – back there.’

They had just passed the Bridge of the Shoguns’ Ladies, where she had stood with Shinzaemon as darkness fell and the moon rose and they had said their farewells.

It had been sixty-six days since then, sixty-six long dreary days. It was so hard waiting without any message, any sign that he was thinking of her or even that he was alive. She tried to picture his face as it had been that night but she couldn’t see it any more. There was nothing but a shadow.

She thought back to the moments of closeness – when they were together on the mountain, when they had said goodbye on the bridge. Even if he returned, the best they could hope for would be to continue meeting in secret, pursuing a forbidden passion. She knew very well that a future together was out of the question. They couldn’t marry. People didn’t choose their own marriage partners – it wasn’t the way the world worked.

Day after day she clung to Shinzaemon’s memory. Now she wondered whether he felt the same way about her. If she was honest with herself, what had really gone on between them? Nothing but a few glances, a moment when they had been carried away by foolish passion. The more she thought about it, the more hopeless her feelings seemed. But still she couldn’t help yearning for him.

With an effort she brought herself back to the present.

They were whirling along the very road she used to take when she went to pray at His Majesty’s tomb. In those days she had travelled in a long procession of palanquins of which hers was the most magnificent, accompanied by guards, attendants, porters and ladies-in-waiting. She remembered pushing up the bamboo blinds every now and then to peek at the castle walls across the moat. After they left the castle area they had turned away from the moat into one of the daimyo districts, lined with vast walled estates.

Now they rattled past broken walls and gates. Every flake of gold leaf, every copper crest, every bronze ornament that had marked the greatness and wealth of the lords had been stripped
away. Nothing but the skeletons of palaces were left. Through the gaping holes in the walls she glimpsed tumbledown buildings blanketed in weeds with charred timbers poking through, more like the haunts of foxes and badgers than places where human beings lived.

From time to time they passed groups of villainous-looking men loitering by the road or squatting in the shadow of a tree. Once Edwards brandished his pistol. But they trotted on without incident.

Finally they saw a bustling highway ahead of them. It was a relief to be surrounded by people after the ominously empty streets of the daimyo districts.

‘The Eastern Sea Road,’ Edwards shouted above the clattering of hooves and the noise of people. It was the highway that led to Kano and Kyoto, many days’ journey away. The road was crammed with people struggling along, pushing carts piled high with bedding, food, kimono chests, trunks, dishes, pots and pans.

They slowed to a walk, skirting a cart that had toppled over sending luggage rolling across the street and tumbling into the drainage channel. A woman, pitifully young, stared up at Sachi with a dazed blank look. She had a child tied to her back and another clinging to her sleeve and was scrabbling about, grabbing at kimonos which had fallen out of their wrappings and lay crumpled in the dust. Her clothes were stained and ragged and her mouth twisted into an expression of fear and horror. But beneath it all her face was pale and aristocratic. She might have been a maid in a daimyo mansion or even somewhere in the women’s palace. Perhaps she was a samurai woman whose husband had been there on the hill – and who had never come home.

Sachi noticed that there were hardly any young men among the crowds. Families of women, children and old people drifted along, their faces pale and empty. The whole population seemed to be fleeing the blighted city.

The road was tightly packed with inns and shops, some boarded up, some open, offering tea or lodging or supplies. Then they passed an open space between the shops. Behind the buildings water sparkled, dazzlingly blue, as far as Sachi could see. She had never seen anything wider than the River Kiso before.
She peered into the distance, trying to see the far bank, but there were no hazy mountains covered in pine trees. There was no other side at all. The water shimmered on for ever until it disappeared into the sky.

It was crammed with craft of all sizes and shapes – big boats, small boats, ferry boats and boats with masts and tall sails hanging limply in the heat. Overshadowing them all was a huge black craft that loomed like a mountain. It puffed smoke from tall chimneys and had masts that poked the sky like burned and blackened tree trunks after a forest fire. There were people running around on it and guns bristling from the sides. There was a second riding a little way from shore.

Sachi knew what they were. Ships, like the Black Ships that had brought the foreigners. She had seen pictures of them in woodblock prints, but she had never guessed they could be so huge. They were like cities floating on the water.

Taki and Haru’s eyes and mouths were as round as hers. They smiled at each other uneasily. It was a most thrilling sight. Yet it was disturbing too, in the same way that the carriage was disturbing. Sachi had never imagined that the world could contain such things.

‘Don’t you know what that is? It’s Edo Bay,’ said Edwards, grinning, seeing their faces all turned towards it. ‘That’s the
Fujiyama
– one of your country’s warships. The ship behind is one of ours.’

Edwards’s house was at the top of a hill overlooking the bay, surrounded by pine trees. Sachi had expected that he would live somewhere extraordinary but it was just a normal house, part of a temple complex. The carriage rumbled into the grounds and jolted to a halt, sending gravel spraying from the wheels. Grateful for Edwards’s hand, Sachi stepped down, her legs shaking. She was dazed from the bumpy ride and covered in dust. For a moment she stood collecting herself, feeling her feet connect with the ground again.

Impatient to see Tatsuemon, she raced to the door, then stopped, suddenly afraid of what she might find.

There was a strange smell about the place – the smell of the sick room, of camphor. Tatsuemon was lying on a futon, propped on
cushions, looking terribly young and thin and vulnerable. There was a big white bandage wrapped around his head and bandages on his arms and legs. One arm was in a sling – but at least it was still there, Sachi thought. His small round face was waxen and his forehead beaded with sweat. His eyes looked huge above his pale cheeks.

A maid was sitting with him. She bowed and scurried away.

Tatsuemon looked at Sachi blankly for a moment, then his eyes widened in recognition. He struggled to pull himself into an upright position and managed a bow.

‘Tatsu, I’m so glad to see you,’ said Sachi softly.

‘I’m sorry, my lady,’ he croaked. ‘Was it . . . Was it you? Edwards-
dono
said it was some ladies. But I didn’t realize . . .’

‘It was Big Sister who found you,’ said Sachi.

Haru had taken the maid’s place and was dabbing Tatsuemon’s forehead with a damp towel. She beamed at him.

‘How are you?’ asked Sachi.

She was about to take his hand, then stopped. He was no longer the shy pretty boy she had known a few months before. He had grown up. His forehead and cheeks were cracked and blackened still from the sun and when he looked at her there was an emptiness in his eyes. He seemed to drift away, as if he couldn’t stop himself seeing sights he would rather forget.

‘Fine,’ he said in the clipped tones of a soldier. For a moment he was not in that cool room but on a steaming rain-sodden battlefield, reporting to his commanding officer. ‘Back on my feet in no time. Got to . . . get back to the front.’

She wondered where he had been, what he had done, what he had seen. When she had last seen him he had been such a boy, obediently following wherever Toranosuké, his handsome idealistic master, led. Ever since she had known Shinzaemon all he had talked of had been war, the glory of war, the glory of death. She too had been seduced by it, swept up in his fervour. But now she had seen those dead bodies. War was not glorious at all, whatever men might say. It was a slaughterhouse.

‘But why were you there?’ Tatsuemon asked, as if it had only just struck him how odd it was that these ladies he had last seen in faraway Kiso should have been wandering around on a battlefield in Edo.

‘It was the cannons,’ said Sachi. ‘You could hear them all over the city. Like thunder. I couldn’t just do nothing. There were many people – many women – up there, looking to see if there was anyone alive and needing help.’

It was all she could do to stop herself demanding, ‘What of Shinzaemon? Where is he? What became of him?’ She had to squeeze her lips together to stop the words coming out.

He fell silent again.

‘Edwards-
dono
told me,’ he muttered after a while, ‘the southerners took the hill and destroyed the temples.’ He stared painfully into some unknown void.

‘They’re cowards, those southerners,’ he said suddenly. ‘They don’t fight face to face like men. They hide behind guns. For half the day they were shelling us from across the valley. We couldn’t even see them. The noise was terrible. And the sound of the shells flying through the air, like . . . a wailing whooshing scream, like ghosts. You didn’t know where they were going to land. There were shells crashing into the ground and exploding, making huge craters, sending mud and earth spewing into the air and bits of men – whatever men were unlucky enough to be there. Arms, hands, feet, legs, guts, chunks of bone flying through the air. Men blown to pieces. That’s not a way for a man to die. How can you fight an enemy who fights like that?