The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (46 page)

His friend the Elder Councillor Matsudaira Sadanobu would issue a warrant
 …

Uzaemon glimpses the enormity of the risk he is taking.

Would they bother with a warrant? Or just dispatch an assassin?

Uzaemon looks away. To stop and think would be to abort the rescue.

Feet splash in puddles. The brown river surges. Pines drip.

Uzaemon asks Shuzai, “Are we to lodge at Isahaya tonight?”

“No. Deguchi of Osaka chooses the best: the Harubayashi Inn at Kurozane.”

“Not the same inn where Enomoto and his entourage stay?”

“The very same. Come now, what group of bandits planning to steal a nun from Mount Shiranui Shrine would
dream
of staying there?”

ISAHAYA’S PRINCIPAL
temple is celebrating the festival of a local god, and the streets are busy enough with hawkers and floats and spectators for six strangers and a palanquin to slip through without notice. Street musicians vie for customers, petty thieves trawl the holiday crowds, and serving girls flirt in front of their inns to reel in customers. Shuzai stays inside his palanquin and orders his men to proceed directly to the gate into Kyôga Domain on the east side of the town. The guardhouse is overrun by a herd of pigs. One of the soldiers, dressed in the domain’s austere livery, gives Deguchi of Osaka’s pass a cursory glance and asks why the merchant has no merchandise. “I sent it all by ship, sir,” answers Shuzai, his Osaka accent grown almost impenetrable, “every last
piece, sir. By the time every customs man in western Honshu’s had his nibble, I’d not be left with the wrinkles on my hands, sir.” He is waved through, but another, more observant guard notices that Uzaemon’s pass is issued via the headman’s office on Dejima. “You’re an interpreter for the foreigners, Ogawa-
san
?”

“Of the third rank, yes, in the Interpreters’ Guild on Dejima.”

“I just ask, sir, because of your pilgrim’s clothes.”

“My father is gravely ill. I wish to pray for him at Kashima.”

“Please”—the guard kicks a squealing piglet—“step into the inspection room.”

Uzaemon stops himself from looking at Shuzai. “Very well.”

“I’ll be with you once we’ve cleared these porkers away.”

The interpreter steps into the small room where a scribe is at work.

Uzaemon curses his luck.
So much for slipping into Kyôga anonymously
.

“Please forgive this inconvenience.” The guard appears and orders the scribe to wait outside. “I sense, Ogawa-
san
, you are a man of your word.”

“I aspire,” Uzaemon answers, worried where this may lead, “to be one, yes.”

“Then I”—the guard kneels and bows low—“I aspire to your good offices, sir. My son’s skull is growing … wrong, lumpen. We—we daren’t take him outside, because people call him an
oni
demon. He’s clever and a fine reader, so it’s not affected his wits, but … he has these headaches, these terrible headaches.”

Uzaemon is disarmed. “What do the doctors say?”

“The first diagnosed ‘burning brain’ and prescribed three gallons of water a day to quench the fires. ‘Water poisoning,’ said the second, and bid us parch our son until his tongue turned black. The third doctor sold us golden acupuncture needles to press into his skull to expel the demon, and the fourth sold us a magic frog, to be licked thirty-three times a day. Nothing worked. Soon he won’t be able to lift his head …”

Uzaemon recalls Dr. Maeno’s recent lecture on elephantiasis.

“… so I’m asking all the pilgrims who pass through to pray at Kashima.”

“Gladly, I’ll recite a healing sutra. What is your son’s name?”

“Thank you. Lots of pilgrims say they will, but it’s only men of honor I can believe in. I’m Imada, and my son’s name is Uokatsu, written
on this.” He passes a folded slip of paper and a lock of his hair. “There’ll be a fee, so—”

“Keep your money. I will pray for Imada Uokatsu when I pray for my father.”

The shogun’s policy of isolation preserves
his
power unchallenged
 …

“May I suppose,” the soldier is bowing again, “Ogawa-
san
also has a son?”

… but sentences Uokatsu and countless others to futile, ignorant deaths
.

“My wife and I”—
more details
, Uzaemon thinks with regret—“are not yet blessed.”

“Lady Kannon will reward your kindness, sir. Now, I am delaying you …”

Uzaemon stores the name paper in his
inrô
pouch. “I wish I could do more.”

T
HE SWAYING FLAMES ARE MOONFLOWER BLUE AND SILENT. ENOMOTO
is seated behind a sunken hearth at the far end of a thin room. The roof is vaulted and ill-defined. He knows Orito is there but does not yet look up. Nearby, the two motionless boy aspirants stare at a
go
board; but for the twitching pulses in their necks, they could be cast from bronze. “You look like an assassin, hovering there …” Enomoto’s sinewy voice reaches her. “Approach, Sister Aibagawa.”

Her feet obey. Orito sits across the watery fire from the lord of Kyôga. He is examining the craftsmanship of what may be a bladeless sword hilt. In the strange firelight, Enomoto looks a full decade younger than she remembers.

If I were an assassin
, she thinks,
you would already be dead
.

“What would happen to your sisters without my protection and the house?”

It is faces he reads
, thinks Orito,
not minds
. “The House of Sisters is a jail.”

“Your sisters would die, miserably and early, in brothels and freak shows.”

“How is that to justify their captivity here as monks’ playthings?”

Click:
an aspirant has placed a black counter on the board.

“Dr. Aibagawa, your honorable father, respected facts, not opinions twisted out of shape.”

The sword hilt in Enomoto’s hand is, Orito sees, a pistol.

“The sisters are not ‘playthings.’ They dedicate twenty years to the Goddess and are provided for after their descents. Many spiritual orders make similar pacts with their adherents but demand lifelong service.”

“What ‘spiritual order’ harvests infants from its nuns like your private sect does?”

Darkness uncoils and slides around the edges of Orito’s vision.

“The fertility of the world below is fed by a river. Shiranui is its spring.”

Orito sifts his tone and words for cynicism but finds faith. “How can an academician—a translator of Isaac Newton—speak like a superstitious peasant?”

“Enlightenment can blind one, Orito. Apply all the empirical methodology you desire to time, gravity, life: their genesis and purposes are, at root, unknowable. It is not superstition but reason that concludes the realm of knowledge is finite and that the brain and the soul are discrete entities.”

Click:
an aspirant has placed a white counter on the board.

“You never treated the Shirandô Academy to this insight, as I recall.”

“We are a spiritual order of limited numbers. The way of Shiranui is no more the way of the scholar than it is the way of the common herd.”

“What noble words for a squalid truth. You coop women up for twenty years, impregnate them, snatch the infants from their breasts—and forge letters to their mothers from all the dead ones as they grow up!”

“Just three sadly deceased gifts have their New Year letters written: three out of thirty-six—or thirty-eight, including Sister Yayoi’s twins. All the others are genuine. Abbess Izu believes this fiction is kinder to the sisters, and experience bears her out.”

“Do the sisters thank you for this kindness when they discover that the son or daughter they wish to join after descent died eighteen years ago?”

“This misfortune has never occurred during my abbotship.”

“Sister Hatsune
is
intending to join her dead daughter, Noriko.”

“Her descent is two years away. If her mind is unchanged, I will explain.”

The bell of Amanohashira rings for the Hour of the Dog.

“It saddens me,” Enomoto says, leaning into the fire, “that you view us as jailers. Perhaps it is a consequence of your relative rank. One birth every two years is a lighter levy than most wives in the world below must endure. To most of your sisters, the masters delivered them from servitude into a pure land on earth.”

“Mount Shiranui Shrine is far from
my
imagining of the pure land.”

“The daughter of Aibagawa Seian is a rare woman. A singular case.”

“I’d prefer not to hear Father’s name on your lips.”

“Aibagawa Seian was my trusted friend before he was your father.”

“A friendship you repay by stealing his orphaned daughter?”

“I brought you home, Sister Aibagawa.”

“I had a home, in Nagasaki.”

“But Shiranui was your home, even before you heard its name. Learning of your vocation in midwifery, I knew. Watching you at the Shirandô Academy, I knew. Years ago, recognizing the Goddess’s mark on your face, I—”

“My face was burned by a pan of hot oil. It was an accident!”

Enomoto smiles like an adoring father. “The Goddess summoned you. She revealed her true self to you, did she not?”

Orito has spoken to no one, not even Yayoi, about the spherical cave and its strange giantess.

Click:
an aspirant places a black counter on the board.

There was a secret seal
, logic assures her,
entering the tunnel
.

Wings beat in the spaces overhead, but when Orito looks up, she sees nothing.

“When you ran away,” Enomoto is saying, “the Goddess called you back …”

Once I believe this lunacy
, Orito thinks,
I am truly Shiranui’s prisoner
.

“… and your soul obeyed, because your soul knows what your mind is too knowledgeable to understand.”

“I came back because Yayoi would have died if I hadn’t.”

“You were an instrument of the Goddess’s compassion. You shall be rewarded.”

Her dread of engiftment opens its ugly mouth. “I … can’t have done to me what is done to the others. I can’t.” Orito is ashamed of these words, and ashamed of her shame.
Spare me what the others endure
, the words mean, and Orito begins to tremble.
Burn!
she urges herself.
Be angry!

Click:
an aspirant has placed a white clamshell counter on the board.

Enomoto’s voice is a caress. “All of us—the Goddess most of all—know what you sacrificed to be here. Look at me with your wise eyes, Orito. We wish to offer you a proposal. No doubt a doctor’s daughter like yourself has noticed Housekeeper Satsuki’s poor health. It is, sadly, a cancer of the womb. She has asked to die on her home island. My men shall take her there in a few days. Her post as housekeeper is yours, if you want it. The Goddess blesses the house with a gift every five or six weeks: your twenty years at the shrine would be spent as a practicing midwife, helping your sisters and deepening your knowledge. Such a valuable asset to my shrine would never be engifted. In addition, I shall procure books—any books—you wish, so you can follow in your father’s scholarly footsteps. After your descent, I shall purchase you a house in Nagasaki, or anywhere else, and pay you a stipend for the rest of your life.”

For four months
, Orito realizes,
the house has bludgeoned me with fear
 …

“You’d be less a sister of Shiranui Shrine than a sister of life.”

… so that this proposal seems not a tether, or a noose, but a rope lowered to a drowning woman
.

Four knocks at the door send ripples across the room.

Enomoto glances past Orito and nods once. “Ah, a long-expected friend has arrived to return a stolen item. I must go and present him with a token of gratitude.” Midnight-blue silk flows upward as Enomoto stands. “Meanwhile, Sister, consider our offer.”

E
MERGING FROM THE REAR PRIVY, UZAEMON LOOKS ACROSS THE
vegetable patch and sees a figure watching him from the bamboo grove. He squints through the half-light.
Otane the herbalist?
She has the same black hood and mountain clothes.
She could be
. She has the same bent back.
Yes
. Uzaemon raises a cautious hand, but the figure turns away, with a slow, sad shake of her gray head.

No
, he mustn’t acknowledge her? Or
No
, the rescue is doomed?

The interpreter puts on a pair of straw sandals left on the veranda and crosses the ruckled vegetable patch to the bamboo. A path of black mud and white frost winds through the grove.

Back at the inn, the rooster crows in the forecourt.

Shuzai and the others
, he thinks,
will be wondering where I am
.

Straw shoes offer little protection for a clerical samurai’s soft feet.

On a snapped cane at eye level is a waxwing: its mouth opens …

… its throat vibrates and spatters out a tuneless tune …

In short arcs it hops, from perch to perch, through the thick grove.

Uzaemon follows through slanted bars of light dark and dark dark …

… through the pressing confinement; thin panes of ice shatter underfoot.

Up ahead, the waxwing beckons him onward, or over to one side?

Are two waxwings
, Uzaemon wonders,
toying with one human?

“Is anyone there?” He dares not raise his voice. “Otane-
sama
?”

The leaves shuffle like paper. The path ends at a noisy river, brown and thick like Dutchmen’s tea.

The far bank is a wall of gouged rock …

… rising up beneath splayed boughs and knuckled roots.

A toe of Mount Shiranui
, Uzaemon thinks.
At its head, Orito is waking
.