The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (42 page)

She opens the door onto what must be the northern courtyard …

THE GODDESS IN
the center of the third altar room is half rotted away: she is unrecognizable from her incarnation in the altar room in the House of Sisters. Her face might be a tertiary syphilitic’s, far beyond the salvation of mercury medicine. One of her arms lies on the floor where it fell, and by the glow of the tallow candle Orito sees a cockroach twitching on the rim of a hole in the statue’s skull. The walls are bamboo and clay, the floor is straw, and the air is sweet with dung: the room would pass for a peasant’s hovel. Orito speculates that the rooms have been hollowed from a spar of Bare Peak, or even hewn out of a series of caves from which the shrine grew as the ages passed.
Better yet
, it occurs to Orito,
it may be an escape tunnel dating from the shrine’s military past
. The far wall is caked with something dark—animal blood mixed with mud, perhaps—on which the unreadable characters are daubed in whitewash. Orito raises the poorly made latch, praying that her guess proves accurate …

THE COLD AND
darkness are from a time before people and fire.

The tunnel is as high as a man and as wide as outstretched arms.

Orito returns for the candle from the last room: it has about an hour’s life.

She enters the tunnel, proceeding step by cautious step.

Bare Peak is above you
, taunts Fear,
pressing down, pressing down
 …

Her shoes
click-clack
on rock; her breath is hissed shivers; all else is silence.

The candle’s grimy glow is better than nothing, but not by much.

She stands still for a moment: the flame is motionless.
No draft yet
.

The roof stays at the height of a man and the width of outstretched arms.

After thirty or forty steps, the tunnel begins to bend upward.

Orito imagines emerging into starlight through a secret crack …

… and worries that her escape may cost Yayoi her life.

The crime is Enomoto’s
, her conscience objects,
Abbess Izu’s, and the Goddess’s
.

The truth isn’t so simple
, her confined echo tells her conscience.

Is the air becoming warmer
, Orito wonders,
or do I have a fever?

THE TUNNEL WIDENS
into a domed chamber around a kneeling effigy of the Goddess three or four times larger than life. To Orito’s dismay, the tunnel ends here. The Goddess is sculpted from a black stone flecked with bright grains, as if the sculptor chiseled her from a block of night sky. Orito wonders how the effigy was carried in: it is easier to believe that the rock has been here since the earth was made and that the tunnel was widened to reach it. The Goddess’s back is erect and cloaked in red cloth, but she cups her giantess’s hands to form a hollow the size of a cradle. Her covetous eyes gaze at the space. Her predatory mouth opens wide.
If the shrine of Shiranui is a question
, the thought thinks Orito as much as Orito thinks the thought,
then this place is its answer
. Inscribed on the smoothed circular wall at shoulder height are more unreadable ideograms: one hundred and eight, she is quite sure, one for each of the Buddhist sins. Something draws Orito’s fingers toward the Goddess’s thigh, and when they touch, she nearly drops the candle: the stone is warm as life. The scholar gropes for an answer.
Ducts from hot springs
, she reasons,
in nearby rocks
 … Where the Goddess’s tongue should be, something glints in the candlelight. Ignoring an irrational fear of the stone teeth severing her arm, she reaches in and finds a squat bottle nestling snug in a hollow. It is blown from cloudy glass, or it is full of a cloudy liquid. She removes the cork and sniffs: it has no smell. Both as doctor’s daughter and Suzaku’s patient, Orito knows better than to taste it.
But why store it in such a place?
She slots the bottle back inside the Goddess’s mouth and asks, “What
are
you? What is done here? To what end?”

The Goddess’s stone nostrils cannot flare. Her baleful eyes cannot be widening ….

The candle is extinguished. Blackness swallows the cavern.

BACK IN THE FIRST
of the altar rooms, Orito readies herself to pass through Master Genmu’s quarters, when she notices the silken cords on the black robes and curses her previous stupidity. Ten of the cords, knotted together, form a light, strong rope as long as the outer wall is high; she attaches another five to make certain. Coiling this up, she slides open the door and skirts the edge of Master Genmu’s room to a side door. A screened passageway leads to an outer door and the masters’ garden, where a bamboo ladder leans against the ramparts. She climbs up, ties one end of her rope around a sturdy, unobtrusive joist, and throws the other from the parapet. Without a backward glance, she takes her last deep breath in captivity and lowers herself to the dry ditch …

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 swath of firs.

One in ten, one in twelve births in the house ends 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
torî
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?

Bitter hatred
, 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 labor. 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 fetuses blocking the neck of Yayoi’s womb.

Clattering acolytes may be dispatched 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 Kyôga 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.

“I
SET OUT EARLY,” SHUZAI REPORTS. “AT JIZO-SAMA’S STATUE
at the marketplace, I lit a three
-sen
candle to ensure against mishap, and I soon had cause to be grateful for the precaution. Trouble found me by Ômagori 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 favors 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 practicing 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 traveler 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 saviors 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. The only other guest was a peddler 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 Kyôga 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 peddler 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 peddler that it’s a rare shrine that turns away paying pilgrims. The peddler 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 peddler, 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 honor 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. Kyôga Domain was created by that decree, and the quiet samurai’s full title became Lord Abbot Kyôga-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 Kyôga 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 notice board of the village of Kurozane. Crows were at work, unpicking a crucified woman. It stank! Seaward, 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 traveler would: how far to Konagai, the next village along? One said four miles, the second said less, the third said farther; 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 Kyôga 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 guaranteed 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.”