The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (60 page)

A voice as small as a mouse's says, ''Scuse,
o-junrei-sama
. . .'

Uzaemon needs a moment to realise that the 'Pilgrim' is him. He turns . . .

. . . and a wren of a boy with a gash for an eye is opening his cupped palms.

A voice warns Uzaemon,
He's begging for coins
, and the pilgrim walks away.

And you
, a voice admonishes him,
are begging for good luck
.

So he turns and returns but the gash-eyed boy is nowhere to be seen.

I am Adam Smith's translator
, he tells himself.
I don't believe in omens
.

After a few minutes he reaches the Magome ward-gate, where he lowers his hood, but a guard recognises him as a samurai and waves him through with a bow.

Lean and rancid artisans' dwellings cluster along the road.

Rented looms in unlit rooms
tack-ratta-clack
-ah,
tack-ratta-clack
-ah . . .

Rangy dogs and hungry children watch him pass, incuriously.

Mud splashes from the wheels of a fodder wagon sliding downhill; a farmer and his son pull it from behind, to help the ox in front. Uzaemon stands aside under a ginkgo tree, and looks down to the harbour, but Dejima is lost in the thickening fog.
I am between two worlds
. He is leaving behind the politics of the Interpreters' Guild, the contempt of the inspectors and most of the Dutch, the deceits and falsifications.
Ahead is an uncertain life with a woman who may not accept me, in a place not yet known
. In the ginkgo's knotted heart a brood of oily crows fling insults. The wagon passes by and the farmer bows as deeply as he can without losing his balance. The false pilgrim adjusts his shin-bindings, secures his shoes and resumes his journey. He musn't miss his rendezvous with Shuzai.

* * *

The Joyful Phoenix Inn stands by a bend in the road, shy of the eight-mile stone from Nagasaki, between a shallow ford and a stone-pit. Uzaemon enters, looking for Shuzai but seeing only the usual citizens of the road sheltering from the cold drizzle: palanquin-carriers and porters, mule-drivers, mendicants, a trio of prostitutes, a man with a fortune-telling monkey, and a bundled-up bearded merchant sitting near, but not with, his gang of servants. The place smells of damp people, steaming rice and pig lard, but it is warmer and drier than outdoors. Uzaemon orders a bowl of walnut dumplings and enters the raised room, worrying about Shuzai and his five hired swords. He is not anxious about the large sum he has given to his friend to pay for the mercenaries: were Shuzai less honest than Uzaemon knows he is, the interpreter would have been arrested days ago. Rather, it is the possibility that Shuzai's sharp-eyed creditors sniffed out his plans to flee Nagasaki and threw a net around their debtor.

Someone knocks on the post: it is one of the landlord's girls with his meal.

He asks her, 'Is it already the Hour of the Horse?'

'Well past noon now, Samurai-
sama
, I do believe it is, yes . . .'

Five Shogunal soldiers enter and the chatter dies away.

The soldiers look around the roomful of evasive faces.

The captain's eye meets Uzaemon's: Uzaemon looks down.
Don't look guilty
, he thinks.
I am a pilgrim bound for Kashima
.

'Landlord?' calls out one guard. 'Where's the landlord of this shit-hole?'

'Gentlemen!' The landlord emerges from the kitchen and kneels on the floor. 'What an indescribable honour for the Joyful Phoenix.'

'Hay and oats for our horses: your stable-boy's flown off.'

'Straight away, Captain.' The landlord knows he will have to accept a credit note that won't be honoured without a bribe of five times its value. He gives orders to his wife, sons and daughters, and the soldiers are shown into the best room in the rear. Cautiously, the chatter resumes.

'I don't forget a face, Samurai-
san
.' The bearded merchant has sidled over.

Avoid encounters
, Shuzai warned him,
avoid witnesses
. 'We never met.'

'But to be sure we did - at Ryugaji Temple on New Year's Day.'

'You are mistaken, old man. I never laid eyes on you. Now, please--'

'But we was talking about ray-skins, Samurai-
san
, an' scabbards . . .'

Uzaemon recognises Shuzai under the bedraggled beard and patched cloak.

'Aye, now you remember! Deguchi, Samurai-
san
- Deguchi of Osaka. Now, I wonder, might I hope for the honour of joining you?'

The maid arrives with a bowl of rice and pickles.

'I don't forget a face.' Shuzai's grin is brown-toothed and his accent different.

The maid's expression tells Uzaemon,
What a tedious old fart
.

'No, miss,' Shuzai drawls. 'Names slip away, but a face, never . . .'

* * *

'It's lone travellers who stick out,' Shuzai's voice comes through the grille of his palanquin, 'but a group of six, on the Isahaya Road? We're as good as invisible. To any part-time informers at the Joyful Phoenix, a taciturn pilgrim wearing a sword is worth watching. But when you left, you were just a pitiful bastard having his ear drilled by a human mosquito. By making you bored, I made you boring.'

Mist blurs the farmhouses, erases the road ahead, hides the valley walls . . .

Deguchi's porters and servants turned out to be Shuzai's hired men: their weapons are hidden in the modified floor of the palanquin.
Tanuki
, Uzaemon memorises their false names,
Kuma, Ishi, Hane, Shakke
. . . They avoid speaking to Uzaemon, as befits their disguise as porters. The remaining six men will be at Mekura Gorge tomorrow.

'By the way,' asks Shuzai, 'did you bring a certain dogwood scroll-tube?'

Say no now
, fears Uzaemon,
and he'll think you don't trust him
.

'Everything of value,' he slaps his midriff, visible to Shuzai, 'is here.'

'Good. If the scroll had fallen into the wrong hands, Enomoto might be expecting us.'

Succeed, and Jiritsu's testimony shan't be needed
. Uzaemon is uneasy.
Fail, and it mustn't be captured
. How de Zoet could ever use this weapon is a question the interpreter cannot answer.

The river below is a drunk, charging boulders and barging banks.

'It's like the Shimantogawa Valley,' says Shuzai, 'in our home domain.'

'The Shimantogawa,' replies Uzaemon, 'is a friendlier river, I think.' He has been wondering about applying for a Court post back in his native Tosa. Upon adoption by the Ogawas of Nagasaki, all ties with his birth-family were severed -
and they'd not be happy to see a third son, a 'cold-rice eater', come back with no fortune and a half-burnt wife
- but he wonders whether his former Dutch teacher might be willing and able to help.
Tosa is the first place
, Uzaemon worries,
Enomoto would look for us
.

What is at stake is not just a fugitive nun but the Lord of Kyoga's reputation.

His friend the Elder Counsellor Matsudaira Sadanobu would issue a warrant . . .

Uzaemon glimpses the enormity of the risk he is taking.

Would they bother with a warrant? Or just despatch 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 Kyoga 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 looking at Shuzai. 'Very well.'

'I'll be with you as soon as we've cleared these damn porkers away.'

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

Uzaemon curses his luck.
So much for slipping into Kyoga 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 worries 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.'