The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (47 page)

Upriver, or downriver, a man is shouting in a hunchbacked dialect.

BUT THE PATH
back to the rear garden of the Harubayashi Inn delivers Uzaemon into a hidden clearing. Here, on a bed of dark pebbles, several dozen head-sized sea-smoothed rocks are enclosed within a knee-high stone wall. There is no shrine, no
torî
gate, no straw ropes hung with paper twists, so it takes the interpreter a little time to recognize that he is in a cemetery. Hugging himself against the cold, he steps over the wall to examine the headstones. The pebbles grind and give beneath his feet.

Numbers, not names, are engraved on the rocks: up to eighty-one.

Invasive bamboo is kept back, and lichen is cleaned from the stones.

Uzaemon wonders if the woman he mistook for Otane is a caretaker.

Perhaps she took fright
, he thinks,
at a samurai charging her way
 …

But what Buddhist sect spurns even desultory death names on its headstones? Without a death name for Lord Enma’s Register of the Dead, as every child knows, a soul is turned away at the next world’s gates. Their ghosts drift for all eternity. Uzaemon speculates that the buried are miscarried children, criminals, or suicides, but is not quite convinced. Even members of the untouchable caste are buried with some sort of name.

There is no birdsong, he notices, in winter’s cage.

“MORE THAN LIKELY, SIR,”
the landlord tells Uzaemon back at the inn, “it was a certain charcoal burner’s girl you saw. She lives with her father ’n’ brother in a tumbledown cottage an’ a million starlings in the thatch, up past Twelve Fields. She drifts this-a-way ’n’ that-a-way up ’n’ down the river, sir. Weak-headed an’ stumble-footed, she is, an’ she’s been with child twice or three times, but they never take root ’cause the daddy was
her
daddy, or else her brother, an’ she’ll die in that tumbledown cottage alone, sir, for what family’d want such impureness dilutin’ its blood?”

“But it was an old woman I saw, not a girl.”

“Kyôga mares are fatter-hipped than the princesses o’ Nagasaki, sir:
a local girl o’ thirteen, fourteen’d pass for an old mare, specially in half-light.”

Uzaemon is dubious. “Then what about this secret graveyard?”

“Oh, there’s no secret, sir: in the hostelers’ trade it’s what we call our ‘long stayers’ quarters.’ There’s many a traveler who falls sick on the road, sir, ’specially on a pilgrims’ route, an’ sleep their last in inns, an’ it costs us landlords a handsome ransom. An’ ‘ransom’ is the word: we can’t very well dump the body by the roadside. What if a relative comes along? What if the ghost scares off business? But a proper funeral needs money, same as everythin’ else in this world, sir, what with priests for chantin’ an’ a stonecutter for a nice tomb an’ a plot of earth in the temple …” The landlord shakes his head. “So, an ancestor of mine cleared the cemetery in the copse for the benefit, sir, of guests who pass away at the Harubayashi. We keep a proper register of the guests lyin’ there, an’ number the stones proper, too, an’ write down the guests’ names if they said one, an’ if it’s a man or woman, an’ guess their age, an’ whatnot. So if any relatives do come lookin’, we can maybe help.”

Shuzai asks, “Are your dead guests often claimed by their relatives?”

“Not once in my time, sir, but we do it, anyway. My wife washes the stones every
O-bon.”

Uzaemon asks, “When was the last body interred there?”

The innkeeper purses his lips. “Fewer single travelers pass through Kyôga, sir, now the Omura Road’s so much improved … Last one was three years ago: a printer gentleman, who went to bed fit as a goat but come mornin’ he was cold as stone. Makes you think, sir, doesn’t it?”

Uzaemon is unsettled by the innkeeper’s tone. “What does it make you think?”

“It’s not just the aged an’ frail Death bundles into his palanquin.”

THE KYÔGA ROAD
follows the Ariake Sea’s muddy shore and then inland through a wood, where one of the hired men, Hane, falls behind and another, Ishi, runs on ahead. “A precaution,” explains Shuzai, from inside his palanquin, “to make sure we aren’t being followed from Kurozane or expected up ahead.” Several upward shrugs of the road later, they cross the narrow Mekura River and take a leaf-strewn track turning up toward the gorge’s mouth. By a moss-blotched
torî
gate, a notice board turns away casual visitors. Here the palanquin is lowered, the weapons removed
from its false floor, and, before Uzaemon’s eyes, Deguchi of Osaka and his long-suffering servants turn into mercenaries. Shuzai emits a sharp whistle. Uzaemon hears nothing—unless a twig cracking is something—but the men hear a signal that all is well. They run with the empty palanquin, climbing shallow curves. The interpreter is soon out of breath. A waterfall’s clatter and boom grows louder and nearer, and around a recent rock fall the men arrive at the lower mouth of Mekura Gorge: a stepped cutting in a low escarpment as high as eight or nine men, cloaked and choked by long-tongued ferns and throttling creepers. Down this drop the cold river plunges. The pool below churns and boils.

Uzaemon becomes a prisoner of the ever-plunging waterfall …

She drinks from this river
, he thinks,
where it is a mountain stream
.

… until a thrush whistles in a flank of wild camellia. Shuzai whistles back. The leaves part and five men emerge. They are dressed in commoners’ clothes, but their faces have the same military hardness as the other masterless samurai. “Let’s get this crate on poles”—Shuzai indicates his battered palanquin—“out of sight.”

Hidden by the wall of camellia in a hollow where the palanquin is covered with branches and leaves. Shuzai introduces the new men by false names: Tsuru, the moon-faced leader, Yagi, Kenka, Muguchi, and Bara; Uzaemon, still dressed as a pilgrim, is named “Junrei.” The new men show him a distant respect, but they look to Shuzai as the leader of the expedition. Whether the mercenaries view Uzaemon as a besotted fool or an honorable man—
and maybe
, Uzaemon considers,
one may be both
—they give no sign. The samurai named Tsuru gives a brief account of their journey from Saga down to Kurozane, and the interpreter thinks of the small steps that gathered this raiding party: Otane the herbalist’s accurate guess at the contents of his heart; Jiritsu the acolyte’s revulsion at the order’s creeds; Enomoto’s nefariousness; and more steps; and more twists—some known, and others not—and Uzaemon marvels at the weaverless loom of fortune.

“THE FIRST PART
of our ascent,” Shuzai is saying, “we’ll make in six groups of two, leaving at five-minute intervals. First, Tsuru and Yagi; second, Kenka and Muguchi; third, Bara and Tanuki; next, Kuma and Ishi; then, Hane and Shakke; and last, Junrei,” he looks at Uzaemon, “and me. We’ll regroup below the gatehouse”—the men cluster around
an inked map of the mountainside, their breaths mingling—“guarding this natural revile. I’ll lead Bara and Tanuki, Tsuru and Hane over this bluff, and we’ll storm the gate from uphill—the unexpected direction—shortly after the change of guard. We’ll bind, gag, and bag them with the ropes and sacks. They’re just farm boys, so don’t kill them, unless they insist. Bare Peak is another two hours’ stiff march, so the monks will be settling down for the night by the time we arrive. Kuma, Hane, Shakke, Ishi: scale the wall here”—Shuzai now unfolds his picture of the shrine—“on the southwest side, where the trees are closest and thickest. First, go to the gatehouse here and let the rest of us in. Then we send for the highest-ranking master. Him we inform that Sister Aibagawa is leaving with us. This will happen peacefully or over a courtyard of slain acolytes. The choice is his.” Shuzai looks at Uzaemon. “A threat you aren’t willing to carry through is no threat at all.”

Uzaemon nods, but,
Please
, he prays,
don’t let any life be lost
.

“Junrei’s face,” Shuzai tells the others, “is known to Enomoto from the Shirandô Academy. Although our obliging landlord informed us that the lord abbot is in Miyako at present, Junrei mustn’t risk being identified, even secondhand. That is why you shall take no part in the raid.”

It is unacceptable
, thinks Uzaemon,
to cower outside like a woman
.

“I know what you’re thinking,” says Shuzai, “but you are not a killer.”

Uzaemon nods, intending to change Shuzai’s mind during the day.

“When we leave, I’ll warn the monks that I’ll cut down any pursuers without mercy. We then withdraw, with the freed prisoner. We’ll cut the vines of Todoroki Bridge to win us more time tomorrow. We pass through the halfway gatehouse during the Hour of the Ox, descend the gorge, and arrive back here by the Hour of the Rabbit. We carry the woman in the palanquin as far as Kashima. There we disperse and leave the domain before horsemen can be dispatched. Any questions?”

WINTER WOODS ARE
creaking, knitted and knotted. Dead leaves lie in deep drifts. Needle tips of birdsong stitch and thread the thicket’s many layers. Shuzai and Uzaemon climb in silence. Here the Mekura River is a bellowing, roiling, echoing thing. The granite sky entombs the valley.

By mid-morning, the arches of Uzaemon’s blistered feet are aching.

Here the Mekura River is as smooth and green as foreign glass.

Shuzai gives Uzaemon oil to rub into his aching calves and ankles, saying, “The swordsman’s first weapon is his feet.”

On a round rock, an immobile heron waits for fish.

“The men you hired,” ventures Uzaemon, “seem to trust you entirely.”

“Some of us studied under the same master in Imabari; most of us served under a minor lordling of Iyo Domain who provoked some fierce skirmishes with his neighbor. To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.”

A splash punctures the jade pool: the heron is gone.

Uzaemon recalls an uncle teaching him long ago to skim stones. He recalls the old woman he saw at sunrise. “There are times when I suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be. This mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.” He looks at his friend, who is watching a bird of prey high above them. “I am sounding like a drunken priest.”

“Not at all,” mumbles Shuzai. “Not at all.”

HIGHER UP THE MOUNTAINSIDE,
limestone cliffs wall in the gorge. Uzaemon begins to see parts of faces in the weatherworn escarpments. A bulge looks like a forehead, a protruding ridge a nose, and excoriations and rock slides, wrinkles and sags.
Even mountains
, thinks Uzaemon,
were once young, and age, and one day die
. One black rift under a shrub-hairy overhang could be a narrowed eye. He imagines ten thousand bats hanging from its ruckled roof …

… all waiting for one spring evening to ignite their small hearts
.

The higher the altitude, the climber sees, the deeper life must hide from winter. Sap is sunk to roots; bears sleep; next year’s snakes are eggs.

My Nagasaki life
, Uzaemon considers,
is as gone as my childhood in Shikoku
.

Uzaemon thinks of his adoptive parents and his wife conducting their affairs, intrigues, and squabbles, but not guessing that they have lost their adopted son and husband. The process will take many months.

He touches the place over his midriff where he carries Orito’s letters.

Soon, beloved, soon
, he thinks.
Just a few hours more
 …

By trying not to remember the creeds of the order, he remembers them.

His hand, he finds, is gripping his sword hilt tight enough to blanch his knuckles.

He wonders whether Orito is already pregnant.

I will care for her
, he swears,
and raise the child as my own
.

Silver birches shiver.
Whatever she wishes is all that matters
.

“WHAT WAS IT LIKE,”
Uzaemon asks a question he’s never asked Shuzai before, “the first time you killed a man?” Sycamore roots grip a steep bank. Shuzai leads for another ten, twenty, thirty paces, until the path arrives at a wide and lapping pool. Shuzai checks the steep, surrounding terrain, as if for ambushers …

… and cocks his head like a dog. He hears something Uzaemon does not.

The swordsman’s half smile says,
One of ours
. “Killing depends on circumstances, as you’d expect, whether it’s a cold, planned murder, or a hot death in a fight, or inspired by honor or a more shameful motive. However many times you kill, though, it’s the first that matters. It’s a man’s first blood that banishes him from the world of the ordinary.” Shuzai kneels at the water’s edge and drinks water from his cupped hands. A feathery fish hovers in the current; a bright berry floats by. “That reckless lordling of Iyo I told you about?” Shuzai climbs onto a rock. “I was sixteen and sworn to serve the greedy dolt. The feud’s history is too long to explain here, but my role in it had me blundering through a thicket on the flank of Mount Ishizuchi one stewed night in the sixth month, separated from my comrades. The frogs’ racket smothered other sound and the darkness was blinding, and suddenly the ground gave way and I fell into an enemy ditch. The scout was as unprepared as I was, and the ditch so stuffed with our two bodies that neither of us could reach our swords. We fumbled and writhed, but neither of us yelled for help. His hands found my throat and clamped and squeezed, tight as Death. My mind was red and shrieking and my throat was crumpling and I thought,
This is it
 … but Fate disagreed. Long ago, Fate had chosen for the enemy lord’s crest a crescent moon. This insignia was attached to my strangler’s helmet so poorly that it snapped off in my hand, so I could slip its sharp metal point through the slit of his eye mask, through the softness behind it, and side to side like a knife in a yam until his grip on my windpipe weakened and fell away.”

Uzaemon washes his hands and drinks some water from the pool.

“Afterward,” says Shuzai, “in marketplaces, cities, hamlets …”

The icy water strikes Uzaemon’s jawbone like a Dutch tuning fork.