Island of Exiles (33 page)

But he was wrong. Just when he was about to give up the pointless struggle, they came for him.

They cut the ropes and dragged him out of his grave and back into fresh air, life, and time.

It was nighttime outside, a chill, wet mountain night with a slight drizzle falling. They dumped Akitada somewhere near a tree and ran back.

Akitada did not know this and, had he known, he could not have taken advantage of the perfect opportunity for escape. He wanted nothing but breath after breath of clean air. He lay on his belly on the wet ground, shaking with the sudden cold after weeks in his grave, and coughed in great wrenching spasms. The moisture in the air he gulped made him aware of a great thirst.

He was breathing water, he thought. He was drowning in sweet-smelling water. Pressing his face and lips into the rain-drenched moss, he sucked up the moisture and wished he could stop shaking and coughing, and just let himself float in the moist, clean air.

His coughing stopped after a while. He rolled himself into a ball against the chill and opened his eyes. In the light of torches and lanterns, men darted back and forth, their shadows moving grotesquely against the cliff face. Others lay about, inert or barely moving. He thought belatedly of escape, but collapsed after the first attempt to rise. After that he sat, staring around him, thankful for the air-much cleaner than any he had breathed in weeks, dizzyingly clean-and enthralled by the visual spectacle after all the time spent in darkness.

A fire in a mine is deadly not because there is much to burn.

Later Akitada was to learn that there were only the notched tree trunks the miners used to ascend and descend between shafts, and baskets and some straw and hemp rope to raise and lower the baskets, and the many small oil lamps and occasional torches with which they lit their way through the tunnels. A fire might start easily if oil was spilled on rope and somehow ignited, but it was the smoke that did the damage. The smoke had nowhere to go and seeped through the tunnels, choking the men.

Eventually Akitada thought of the filth caking his skin and took off the sodden rag of a shirt. Pressing it against the wet moss and then scrubbing himself with it was exhausting work, but he felt better afterward. Sitting there, stark naked in the chill mountain air, he looked around for something to cover himself with. No one paid attention to him. He crawled over to one of the still bodies. The man was dead, his eyes rolled back into his head and his face black with soot, but his clothes, a cotton shirt and a pair of short pants, were almost dry because he lay under a tree. Akitada managed to take the shirt and pants off the corpse and put them on himself. But the effort was all he could manage. He collapsed beside the dead man and fell into a brief sleep of exhaustion.

He woke when the goblin and her companion wrapped a chain around his waist and attached it to the tree. It was loose enough to allow short steps if he could have stood up. His hands were tied in front with rope, so that he was much more comfortable than in the mine. The corpse was gone, tossed on top of a couple others. Akitada spent the rest of that wet cold night leaning against the tree trunk, alternately shivering and dozing, too weak and tired to take notice of the dark figures milling about and the coarse shouts and cracks of whips.

The rain stopped at dawn when blessed light returned, a gray and filtered light here under the tree on a cloudy morning, but that, too, was a blessing, for his eyes were no longer used to sun. The goblin returned with a bowl of food. He ate it gratefully, sitting up and lifting the bowl to his mouth like a man instead of an animal. It took so little now to please him.

But the distinction between men and beasts began to blur again as he saw his surroundings. They were somewhere in the mountains, fairly high up. Before him was a wide, open space covered with rubble and stone dust and ragged creatures. Ahead rose a cliff perforated by many holes, some only large enough for a small animal to enter, some-like the one from which he had emerged and around which still hovered a slight smoky haze-large enough to drive an ox carriage through.

For a mine, it was a small operation. Akitada saw no more than fifty people. About a third were guards. Several of them were Ezo, bearded and wearing fur jackets, and all were armed with bows and swords or carried leather whips. Most of the miners wore few clothes, and chains hobbled their feet so they could only shuffle along. So much for Kumo’s gentle treatment of his workers, Akitada thought. Though these men had been condemned to hard labor for violent crimes, the number of armed guards seemed excessive, particularly in view of the convicts’ miserable and cowed behavior. Indeed, where would they run to on this island?

At the moment, they sat or lay on the ground, but already one of the guards was walking about, snapping a leather whip.

One by one, the men stood, chains clinking, heads hanging, arms slack. A few glanced toward the corpses, but nobody spoke.

Some of the miners were half naked, and several of the smallest had rags wound around their knees and lower arms like little Jisei. Akitada glanced up at the holes in the cliff face.

They must be the badger holes the doctor had talked about.

The guards rounded up the bigger convicts and marched them back into the smoking cave opening. They resisted briefly, protesting and gesturing, but the whip soon bit into their backs

and bare calves and, one by one, they disappeared into the earth. One of the guards followed but returned quickly, gasping and coughing, to wave another guard in. They took turns this way, but the convicts only reappeared briefly, dragging charred timbers or carrying baskets of equipment. The cleanup had begun.

As the daylight grew stronger, he saw that his knee was still swollen and the tight skin was an ugly black and purplish red.

But the cooling rain had soothed the throbbing, and after a while Akitada began to test his leg. He could move foot and ankle easily, but the knee was too stiff to bend more than a little.

Still, he was encouraged that it would heal in time.

The remaining convicts were fed and put to their normal tasks. Half-naked, childlike figures with small baskets scrambled up the cliff and, one by one, disappeared into the badger holes, from which they reappeared after a while, bare buttocks first, dragging out baskets of chipped rock. The baskets were passed to the ground, where other convicts took them down the slope toward a curious wooden rig. This appeared to be some sort of a sluice carrying a stream of water down a gentle incline. Two men walked a treadmill that raised buckets of water from a stream to the top of the sluice.

Armed guards watched seated workers who used stone mallets to crush the rock chips into coarse sand before emptying that into the sluice. Now and then a worker would lift a traylike section of the wooden sluice to pick through the debris caught in it before reinserting it for the next batch of ground rock.

Akitada watched this, trying to account for the amount of effort expended on rock. He had never seen such a time-consuming and inefficient method of mining. No wonder the emperor saw so little silver from Kumo’s operations.

Toward noon there was an unpleasant interruption. A horseman trotted to the center of the clearing, stared at the smoky cave opening, then shouted, “Katsu.” One of the guards appeared from the mouth of the cave, ran forward, and bowed.

“The master’s displeased,” the rider barked. “This is the second time in one month. You are careless. How many this time?” The guard bowed several times and stammered something, pointing to the corpses.

“Three? Well, you won’t get any more. Put everybody to work. Guards, too. Your last take was disappointing.”

“But we’re running out of good rock. Just look. We had to make six new badger holes.”

The horseman slid off his horse and together they went to the cliff and looked up. The new arrival was short and had a strange, uneven gait. They stood and watched as one of the miners backed out of his hole and lowered his basket to the ground. The newcomer reached in and inspected its contents, shaking his head.

Akitada could no longer hear what was said, but the horseman seemed familiar. He had heard that voice before. Then it came to him that it had been in Kumo’s stable yard. This was Kita, the mine overseer who had arrived with bad news that night. Another fire.

But he was unprepared for what happened next: Kita turned his head and Akitada saw his profile. Kita was the bird-faced man who had followed him to Minato and later to the monastery. He would have recognized that beaky nose anywhere. Then the overseer turned fully his way, shading his eyes to see better, and asked a question. When the two men started purposefully toward him, Akitada knew that his troubles were far from over.

When Tora and Turtle returned to his sister’s hostel, they found several excited children waiting anxiously at the door.

Apparently they looked forward to sharing the remnants of the dinner the generous guest had paid for.

Tora was no longer very hungry after the noodle soup but did not want to seem unappreciative of Turtle’s sister, whose name was Oyoshi, and asked the whole family to join him. An amazing number of children appeared instantly. They all sat down on the torn and stained mats of the main room, the children in their gay, multicolored bits of clothing lined up on either side of their mother, three girls to one side, five boys to the other. She served Tora and her brother first, steaming bowls of rice covered with vegetables and chunks of fish. An appetizing smell filled the room. Tora sampled, while the children watched him fixedly, licking their lips. The food was quite tasty and he said so, inviting the others to join them. To his discomfort, Turtle’s sister served only the little boys. She and the little girls had to wait until the men had eaten their fill.

Nevertheless, it was a cheerful gathering, with Turtle chattering away and the children giggling. But when Turtle mentioned their run-in with Wada earlier that day, his sister suddenly burst into such vicious invective that even he stared at her.

“Why, what’d he do to you?” he asked when she ran out of terms of abuse.

“Not me, you fool. Little Flower. She was near to dying on the street when I heard. I brought her here this morning.” Turtle’s eyes grew large. “Amida. Not again! And just now.

I should have known bad luck was coming when that crow cawed at me.”

“Who’s Little Flower?” Tora asked.

“She’s the whore I told you about,” said Turtle, looking apologetic. “Wada’s girl. They call her that because she’s sort of small and pretty. He likes them that way.”

“Well, she’s not feeling very pretty now,” his sister snapped.

“That bastard!”

“Damn,” said the Turtle. “I didn’t know. But if she’s laid up, maybe he’s got somebody else. I can find out.”

“More fool she,” muttered his sister, refilling a boy’s bowl while three little girls watched hungrily. Only the baby, lashed to its mother’s back, was uninterested in the food and stared with unblinking eyes at Tora over its mother’s shoulder. He wondered where the children’s father was. Having tended to her sons, Oyoshi looked sternly at her brother. “You stay out of it, Taimai. He’d kill you as soon as slap at a fly.”

“Could I talk to this Little Flower?” asked Tora, pushing his half-filled bowl toward the little girls.

Their mother snatched it away and divided the contents among the boys. Men came first in her household. Having reestablished the sacred order, she turned a gap-toothed smile on Tora and said, “A strapping officer like you doesn’t want a pitiful little flower. Let me fix you up with a real beauty for the night, Master Tora. Only fifty coppers, and you’ll feel like you’ve been to paradise.”

Her wheedling tone was familiar. Tora had heard such propositions before and was not too surprised that Turtle’s sister also worked as a procuress. People did what they had to do in order to feed a large family. He grinned. “But I like them little and bruised,” he teased.

Her smile faded. She had begun gathering the various leftovers for herself and the hungry girls, but now paused to look at Tora dubiously. “Well, she needs the money, but . . . you aren’t planning to beat her? Because, I tell you, I won’t have it.

She can’t take any more.”

Tora flushed to the roots of his hair. “No. I was joking. I don’t beat my women. I just want to talk to her, that’s all.”

“Just talk? Hmm,” she muttered, frowning at him. “Well, I’ll go and ask her.” She left the little girls watching tearfully as one of the boys helped himself to several juicy bits of fish.

When their mother returned a moment later, Tora insisted that she let the girls eat now and watched as they fell on their food like small savages. Then he followed her to the back of the hostel.

This part of the building looked worse than where Tora’s room was. The walls leaned at odd angles, water had leaked in and stained them black, and doors did not shut properly or were missing entirely. Here and there whole boards were gone, put to use in other places. He glanced into empty rooms, each no more than a tiny cubicle, hardly large enough for two people to lie down together, and passed others, inadequately covered by ragged quilts pinned up in the doorway, where he heard the grunts and squeals of lovemaking. Oyoshi opened the last door and said to someone inside, “Here he is, dear. Mind you, you don’t have to have him.”

Tora ducked into a dark space. In the dim flicker from his hostess’s oil lamp, he made out a cowering figure in one corner.

“We’ll need a candle,” he said.

“I have no candles, Master Tora. Too much money,” his hostess said sadly. “I can leave my lamp, but please bring it back.

Oil’s expensive, too.” She closed the door behind him.

The oil also stank and smoked. He squatted on the floor, and they looked at each other by the fitful light. Tora thought at first that she was a little girl of ten or eleven. Little Flower was tiny and small-boned, and perhaps she had been pretty once, but now she looked sick and discontented; her eyes were ringed with dark circles, her lips pinched, and her thin cheeks unnaturally flushed. She gave him a nod and a tremulous smile.