The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (56 page)

Not safe yet
. Orito scrambles into a lattice of winter boughs.

She keeps the Shrine wall on her right and refuses to think about Yayoi.

Big twins
, she thinks,
a fortnight late; a pelvis slimmer than Kawasemi's . . .

Rounding the western corner, Orito cuts through a swathe of firs.

One in ten, one in twelve births in the House end with a dead woman.

Through stony ice and needle drifts she finds a sheltered bowl.

With your knowledge and skill
, this is no vain boast,
it would be one in thirty
.

The wind's quick sleeves catch on the thorny glassy trees.

'If you turn back,' Orito warns herself, 'you know what the men will do.'

She finds the trail where the slope of
tori
gates begins. Their daylight cinnabar orange is black against the night sky.

Nobody can ask me to submit to enslavement, not even Yayoi . . .

Then Orito considers the weapon she acquired in the Scriptorium.

To doubt one New Year Letter
, she could threaten Genmu,
is to doubt them all . . .

Would the Sisters consent to the terms of the House if they weren't sure their Gifts were alive and well in the World Below?

Morbid vengefulness
, she would add,
does not make for fruitful pregnancies
.

The path turns a sharp corner. The constellation of the Hunter appears.

No
. Orito dismisses the half-thought.
I shall never go back
.

She concentrates on the steep and icy path. An injury now could ruin her hopes of reaching Otane's cottage by dawn. An eighth of an hour later Orito turns a high corner above the wood-and-vine bridge called Todoroki, and catches her breath. Mekura Gorge plunges down the mountainside, vast as the sky . . .

. . . A bell is ringing at the Shrine. It is not the deep time-bell, but a higher-pitched, insistent bell, rung in the House of Sisters when one of the women goes into labour. Orito imagines Yayoi calling her. She imagines the frantic disbelief prompted by her disappearance, the searches throughout the Precincts, and the discovery of her rope. She imagines Master Genmu being woken:
The Newest Sister is gone . . .

She imagines knotted twin foetuses blocking the neck of Yayoi's womb.

Clattering acolytes may be despatched down the path, the Halfway Gatehouse will be told of her disappearance, and the domain checkpoints at Isahaya and Kashima will be alerted tomorrow, but the Kyoga Mountains are an eternity of forest for fugitives to vanish into.
You shall go back
, Orito thinks,
only
if you choose to
.

She imagines Master Suzaku, helpless, as Yayoi's screams scald the air.

The bell could be a trick
, she considers,
to lure you back
.

Far, far below, the Ariake Sea is burnished by the moonlight . . .

What may be a trick tonight will be the truth tomorrow night, or very soon . . .

'The liberty of Aibagawa Orito,' Orito speaks out loud, 'is more important than the life of Yayoi and her twins.' She examines the truth of the statement.

XXII

Shuzai's Room at his
Dojo
Hall in Nagasaki

Afternoon of the Thirteenth Day of the First Month

'I set out early,' Shuzai reports. 'At Jizo-
sama
's statue at the marketplace I lit a three-sen candle to insure against mishap, and I soon had cause to be grateful for the precaution. Trouble found me by Omagori Bridge. A captain in the Shogunal Guard on horseback blocked my path: he'd glimpsed my scabbard under my straw cape, and wanted to check that I had the rank to carry one. "Fortune never favours he who wears another's clothes", so I gave him my true name. Lucky it was I did. He dismounted, removed his own helmet and called me "Sensei": I taught one of his sons when I first arrived in Nagasaki. We talked awhile, and I told him I was bound for Saga, for my old master's seventh-year funeral ceremony. Servants wouldn't be appropriate on such a pilgrimage, I claimed. The captain was embarrassed by this attempt to disguise my poverty, so he agreed, bade me good luck and rode on.'

Four students are practising their best
kendo
shrieks in the
dojo
.

Uzaemon feels a cold blossoming in his sore throat.

'From Oyster Bay - a midden of fishermen's hovels, shells and rotting rope - I turned north to Isahaya. Low, hilly land, as you know, and on a dismal First Month afternoon, the road is atrocious. By a crooked bend, four porters appeared from behind a shuttered-up tea-shack - a leerier pack of wild dogs you never saw. Each carried a hefty bludgeon in his scabby hand. They warned me that robbers would pounce upon a luckless, friendless, helpless traveller like myself, and urged me to hire them so I'd arrive at Isahaya unharmed. I drew my sword and assured them I was not as luckless, friendless or helpless as they believed. My gallant saviours melted away, and I reached Isahaya without further excitement. Here I avoided the bigger, more conspicuous inns, and took lodgings in the loft of a talkative tea-roaster's. The only other guest was a pedlar of amulets and charms from holy places as far off as Ezo, so he claimed.'

Uzaemon catches his sneeze in a paper square, which he tosses onto the fire.

Shuzai hangs the kettle low over the flames. 'I tapped my landlord for what he knew about Kyoga Domain. "Eighty square miles of mountain with not one town worthy of the name", save for Kashima. The Lord Abbot takes a cut from the temples there, and harvests rice taxes from the coastal villages, but his real power flows from allies in Edo and Miyako. He feels secure enough to maintain just two divisions of guards: one to keep up appearances when his entourage travels and one barracked in Kashima to quell any local troubles. The amulet pedlar told me how he'd once tried to visit the shrine on Mount Shiranui. He'd spent several hours climbing up a steep ravine called Mekura Gorge, only to be turned back at a gatehouse halfway up. Three big village thugs, he complained, told him that Shiranui Shrine doesn't trade in lucky charms. I put it to the pedlar that it's a rare shrine that turns away paying pilgrims. The pedlar agreed, then told me this story from the reign of Kan'ei, when the harvests failed for three years all across Kyushu. Towns as far off as Hirado, Hakata and Nagasaki suffered starvation and riots. It was this famine, swore the pedlar, that led to rebellion in Shimabara and the humiliation of the Shogun's first army. During the mayhem, a quiet samurai begged Shogun Ieyasu for the honour of leading, and financing, a battalion in the second attempt to crush the rebels. He fought so audaciously that after the last Christian head was hoisted on the last pike, a Shogunal decree obliged the disgraced Nabeshima clan of Hizen to cede the samurai not only a certain obscure shrine on Mount Shiranui but the entire mountainous region. Kyoga Domain was created by that decree, and the quiet samurai's full title became Lord Abbot Kyoga-no-Enomoto-no-
kami
. The present Lord Abbot must be his . . .' Shuzai calculates on his fingers '. . . his great-great-grandson, give or take a generation.'

He pours tea for Uzaemon, and both men light their pipes.

'The sea-fog was thick the next morning, and after a mile I struck off east, circling Isahaya from the north, around to the Ariake Sea Road. Better to enter Kyoga Domain, I reckoned, without the guards at the gate seeing my face. I walked along half the morning, passing through several villages with my hood down, until I found myself at the noticeboard of the village of Kurozane. Crows were at work unpicking a crucified woman. It stank! Seawards, the fog was dividing itself between weak sky and brown mudflats. Three old mussel-gatherers were resting on a rock. I asked them what any traveller would: how far to Konagai, the next village along? One said four miles, the second said less, the third said further; only the last had ever been, and that was thirty years ago. I made no mention of Otane the herbalist, but asked about the crucified woman, and they told me she'd been beaten most nights for three years by her husband, and had celebrated the New Year by opening his head with a hammer. The Lord Abbot's Magistrate had ordered the Executioner to behead her cleanly, which gave me a chance to ask whether Lord Abbot Enomoto was a fair master. Perhaps they didn't trust a stranger with an alien accent, but they all agreed they'd been born here as rewards for good deeds in previous lives. The Lord of Hizen, one pointed out, stole one farmer's son in eight for military duties and bled his villagers white to keep his family in Edo in luxury. In contrast, the Lord of Kyoga imposed the rice tax only when the harvest was good, ordered a supply of food and oil for the shrine on Mount Shiranui, and required no more than three guards for the Mekura Gorge gate. In return, the Shrine guarantees fertile streams for the rice paddies, a bay teeming with eels and baskets full of seaweed. I wondered how much rice the Shrine ate in a year. Fifty
koku
, they said, or enough for fifty men.'

Fifty men!
Uzaemon is dismayed.
We need an
army
of mercenaries
.

'After Kurozane,' Shuzai shows no undue concern, 'the road passes a smart-looking inn, the Harubayashi, as in "spring bamboo". A short distance on, an uphill track turns off the coast road and leads up to the mouth of Mekura Gorge. The trail up the mountain is well maintained, but it took me half the day. The guards at the checkpoint don't expect intruders, that much was clear - one well-placed sentinel would have seen me coming - but . . .' Shuzai wrinkles his mouth to indicate an easy climb. 'The gatehouse seals a narrow mouth of the gorge, but you'd not need ten years of ninja training to climb up around it, which was what I did. Higher up, patches of snow and ice appeared, and pine and cedar muscled out the lowland trees. The track climbs a couple more hours to a high bridge over the river; a stone marker names the place Todoroki. Not long after, there's a long, steep corridor of
tori
gates where I left the path and climbed up through a pine-forest. I came to the lip of an outcrop midway up Bare Peak, and this drawing,' Shuzai removes a square of paper hidden in a folded book, 'is based on the sketches I made on the spot.'

Uzaemon surveys Orito's prison for the first time.