The Samurai's Daughter

  He flung open doors and poked into futon cupboards with his sword, then ordered a sullen-faced servant to open the storehouse. The man hesitated but Nobu raised his rifle and he nodded and scurried to the back of the house.

  The storehouse was huge, the most lavish Nobu had ever seen. The servant pulled open the door to reveal scrolls, vases and boxes of pottery piled in heaps, higgledy-piggledy, as if thrown in in a hurry. Nobu dug through the mountain of goods, throwing things aside, but it was just the usual samurai furnishings, nothing marked with Fujino’s flamboyant geisha taste. He’d cleaned and polished Taka’s house for half a year, he knew every dish, every hanging, every scroll. If anything of hers was stored here, he’d have known it straight away. But there was nothing.

  He was wasting time, he realized. There was nothing here; but before he left, at least he’d make a few enquiries. He frowned, wondering what he could ask that could possibly produce the information he needed.

  ‘Where are your masters and mistresses?’ he barked. The servants glowered at him. ‘Don’t try anything stupid,’ he added, playing for time. ‘My men are on their way. They’ll be here any moment.’

  They gawped at him, mouths hanging open. He could see they were beginning to guess he didn’t have any back-up. They were testing him, playing stupid. Or perhaps they couldn’t understand his dialect. He repeated the question slowly and clearly with a good Tokyo accent but they still stared stubbornly at the ground. As he swung round, a burly youth with a heavy brow and jutting lower jaw twisted his mouth into an insolent leer. Nobu grabbed him by the collar. ‘Come on, lad, you’ve got a tongue.’

  The youth’s face contorted into a grimace of hatred and he raised his fist and lashed out. Nobu saw the blow coming, stepped back, clamped his hand around his assailant’s wrist and twisted hard, pulling the fellow off balance, using the force of the man’s own movement to send him crashing to the floor. There were no tatami mats to cushion his fall and he hit the ground hard.

  A couple of other brawny young fellows had slunk forward. Nobu glimpsed a flash out of the corner of his eye as one snatched up a poker and lunged at his head. He dodged, swung his rifle round and drove the barrel hard into the man’s stomach. The poker clattered to the ground and the fellow exhaled like a punctured balloon and crumpled, clutching his stomach and wheezing painfully, gasping for breath. The third man drew back nervously. The burly youth was scrambling to his knees.

  Nobu cocked his rifle and levelled it at the men. ‘Anyone else want to take on His Imperial Majesty’s Army?’ he demanded. ‘Wait till my boys arrive. You’ll be wishing it was only me you had to deal with. Just give me an answer.’

  An old man with a darkly tanned shaven pate and white hair oiled into a topknot limped forward. ‘They can’t understand you.’ He had a thick Satsuma accent. ‘And even if they could they wouldn’t know. We’re just servants. We don’t know anything.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Your masters and mistresses, where did they go?’

  ‘They just cleared out. Wish we could have gone too before you bastards arrived. We’ve had half the town rabble in here, rampaging through the place, scaring the wits out of us, taking everything they could lay their hands on. Look around if you like. You won’t find anything.’ The man threw up his hands.

  The other servants had pulled the attackers to their feet and they lined up against the wall, scowling. Nobu needed to be out of there quickly.

  He groaned. He wasn’t getting anywhere. Then out of the corner of his eye he noticed that something looked wrong. There was something out of place. The lintel. The halberd hooks were freshly polished but the halberd was missing. He thought back to the lawn he’d crossed. It had been flattened as if people had been sparring there so recently that the grass hadn’t had time to spring back. The weapons racks in the entryway were empty too. The men would have taken the swords and rifles when they went off to the mountains, but that didn’t explain why the halberds were gone.

  ‘Your ladies aren’t planning to attack us, are they?’ he demanded. ‘That would be very foolish.’

  The old man shuffled. ‘Ladies have their hobbies,’ he mumbled. ‘Needlework, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, halberds – you know what ladies are like.’

  Halberds. Unbidden, a memory surged up of Nobu’s sisters practising with their halberds in Aizu. He could almost hear their sharp young voices and the crack of wood on wood and remembered the sun slanting through the trees in the crisp morning air. Tears sprang to his eyes and he blinked fiercely. That had been no hobby, they’d been preparing for war. He wondered if Taka had taken up the halberd too. It would be like her to fight if her city was threatened.

  He’d had enough of beating round the bush. There was nothing to lose by asking as directly as he dared.

  ‘We’re looking for … for a family.’ He didn’t mention the name. No one would give away anything about the great Kitaoka or anyone related to him. ‘We intend them no harm. We heard they moved down here from Tokyo.’

  The old man studied him, eyes narrowed.

  ‘You won’t find them here, whoever they are,’ he said cautiously. ‘It’s all old families in this part of town. People from Tokyo don’t settle here. By the time they get here they’re in reduced circumstances, they’ve left everything behind. Once they get here they lead modest lives.’

  Nobu nodded. The old man was right. General Kitaoka himself might not have lived in a splendid house in the samurai quarter such as the family had had in Tokyo. He might have lived somewhere small, without space for Taka and her mother. Or perhaps he hadn’t even acknowledged them, hadn’t wanted them to live with him. Perhaps he’d simply left them to their own devices.

  Fujino was a geisha. Arriving in an unknown city, surely she would have looked for a place to live in an area where she felt at home – such as the geisha district.

  ‘Keep the volcano on your left,’ the old man had told him, looking at him quizzically from under straggly white eyebrows when he asked for directions. ‘You’ll find the geisha district on the edge of town, as it should be, well away from where decent folk live. Look for salt fields and a salt kiln and a sand mountain and a huge graveyard, largest in all Satsuma, and you’ll be there. Salt fields and graves and prostitutes go together, that’s what we say round these parts.’

  Salt fields, graves and prostitutes … As Nobu left the samurai district for the seedier parts of town, he knew he was putting distance between himself and the army, camped out at the castle and the barracks. He was further from safety but also further from prying eyes. He came across scouting parties and some of his fellow lieutenants patrolling alone or in pairs. There were quite a few like him, it seemed, who preferred to be out on their own.

  By the time he crossed the line of pine trees that marked the beginning of the merchant district he’d been searching for most of the day. He was tired and hungry, his legs ached and his feet, encased in hard leather boots, were chafed and raw.

  The looters had been hard at work. The wealthy houses of the merchant district looked as if they’d been hit by an earthquake. They were right on the road, not hidden behind high walls, which made them that much easier to break into. Nearly all the rain doors were splintered or torn down and there were broken chests and upturned drawers, rolls of paper and bolts of silk littering the road. The shops were barred and shuttered but most of those had been broken into too. A dead rat lay in the gutter alongside piles of rotting vegetables and mangy dogs tore at bloodied pieces of meat, snarling and baring their fangs at Nobu as he hurried by, keeping a wide berth.

  He still hadn’t seen any salt flats or a sand mountain and certainly no huge graveyard when he came to a narrow street lined with small wooden houses jammed together side by side. Smells of hair oil and perfume mingled with the dust and sewage. Without people the road was desolate, the houses faded and shabby in the afternoon light. Outside nearly every house was a lantern and he sensed people behind the closed doors. The stubborn old battleaxes who
ran the place wouldn’t be so easily separated from their livelihoods.

  He checked the nameplates but none read ‘Kitaoka’. Of course, Kitaoka was far too grand a name to splash across the door of a geisha house. If Fujino was here, she probably went under her professional name, but he didn’t know what that was. Once again he was banging his head against a stone wall.

  He stared at the little plants pushing up through the black volcanic silt that dusted the ground. A cat sidled up to him, purring, and wrapped itself around his legs and he bent down to pat it. It was hopeless. She probably wasn’t even here. He should just give up and go back to his fellow soldiers and forget this absurd quest.

  Then a bird swooped across the tiled roofs with a flash of white and landed on a willow tree, setting the leaves rustling. Nobu recognized the long iridescent tail, like a folded fan, and the white breast and black and blue plumage. A magpie, a bird of good omen.

  It spread its wings, revealing its white underbelly and wing tips, and swooped down and hopped along the street. He thought of the kind-hearted magpies in the Tanabata story who put their wings together once a year to form a bridge across the River of Heaven so that the weaver princess and the cowherd could meet, and wondered idly if it had come to lead him to his own weaver princess.

  The magpie paused outside a house with no lantern and no nameplate. The rain doors were bolted shut, like a blind eye in the street. It cocked its head, looked at him with a beady eye and let out a caw. Nobu had run straight past the house. Now he looked again. No lantern: so it was not a geisha house, not open for business. It was a private residence. He gasped. The scales seemed to drop from his eyes and he wondered, with a lurch of the heart, if this could be the place.

  He’d stretched out his hand to knock when the magpie flapped its wings and flew away. The movement shook him awake, as if from a dream. He started and looked around and saw, as if for the first time, where he was and what he was doing and shuddered with horror. Here he was, in the uniform of His Imperial Majesty’s Army, in the geisha district of all places, about to rap on the door of a house of ill repute.

  Voices clamoured in his head. He remembered how excited and proud he’d been when he left Tokyo, determined to bring their sworn enemies to heel, how he’d taken the train to Yokohama and boarded the ship shoulder to shoulder with thousands of his fellow soldiers, all with the same mission, fired with the same zeal. The time had come for revenge – and by an extraordinary stroke of luck, the revenge of the Aizu clan coincided with the welfare of their country. It was their patriotic duty to attack their enemies.

  He thought of his father, living like a peasant, grubbing around just to stay alive, when he should have been enjoying a prosperous old age, and of his brothers, in the mountains fighting, maybe wounded or dead. He thought of his mother and his sisters and his grandmother, of his city reduced to rubble and his people living in destitution. He owed it to all of them to destroy the enemy who’d ruined his family and his clan.

  Whatever wild impulse had brought him here, it was against all his better judgement. He’d had a moment of madness but now, thank the gods, he’d come to his senses. There was work to be done. It was time to go – get back to his unit, get on with unearthing the last nests of rebels.

  But he couldn’t bear to leave. He stood rooted to the spot, squeezed his hands into fists and screwed his eyes tight shut. He knew what was right, he knew what he had to do but it wrenched his soul to do it.

  He took a breath, summoned up all his willpower and turned to go. But then the wind rattled the door and he caught a whiff of aloe and musk, of kyara and myrrh. In a heartbeat he was back in Tokyo, kneeling on a veranda, reading aloud while a small white hand pointed out the words, character by character. He was walking with a slender girl in the woods of her estate, collecting horsetail shoots; in a garden on a sultry summer evening with a soft sweet-smelling body nestling against his, feeling her hair brush his cheek.

  Before he could stop himself he’d knocked. He held his breath and listened, half hoping there’d be no one there. He would just go, he told himself, he’d leave in peace. But there was someone there, he heard a faint noise.

  He knocked again more loudly. There was silence now but he was beyond caring. The door was old and wobbly, it stuck in its grooves, but he wiggled it impatiently and it opened a crack. That scent wafted out.

  33

  CROUCHING ON THE stairs in the darkness, Taka held her breath, her heart thundering, staring mesmerized at the thread of light framing the door as it wavered and broke, then flickered into view again. A pebble clattered somewhere nearby. There was someone there. There was definitely someone outside.

  Normally there’d have been women gossiping, geishas chatting in bird-like coos, men shuffling around in clogs, talking and laughing at the top of their voices. But now there was just the cawing of crows, the wind rustling in the trees, the murmur of the ocean and, far away, like distant thunder, the rumble and roar of the advancing army. Dogs barked and a fox let out an unearthly wail.

  She’d been rummaging through the trunk in the upstairs room, pulling out musty books, perfumed hair ornaments sticky with oil, faded letters from her father, things her mother wouldn’t want to leave behind. She’d hoped against hope she might find something there to remind her of Nobu but the only thing she’d had was the amulet and she’d given that to Kuninosuké. She hoped at least it was keeping him safe, keeping all of them safe.

  Then she’d heard footsteps in the silence. She sat back on her heels and listened, wondering who could be abroad in this city of ghosts. It was not the crunch of straw sandals or the patter of clogs but boots, pounding along the street. She’d crept to the balcony and peeked out just long enough to see a figure all in black, with a rifle slung on his shoulder, coming towards the house. She could tell by the clothes and the cap it was not a looter. It was something much more frightening – an enemy soldier.

  The boots passed by and she let out a sigh of relief, then her heart began to thump again as the footsteps turned and came back and stopped right outside her door.

  Suddenly she remembered with a shock of horror that the door wasn’t locked. She’d thought she’d be safe from looters or soldiers in this run-down neighbourhood. Not that a lock would be much use against soldiers’ boots. They probably wouldn’t even stop to check if it was locked or not. She sat silent as a mouse, expecting to hear a deafening crash and the splinter of wood. There was a long silence, then a knock that sent a shudder of fear along her spine.

  She summoned up her courage. Her mother had stood up to the soldiers when they broke into their house in Kyoto. She had to be as strong as her. Her halberd was downstairs, not far from the door. If she could get to it, she’d show him what a Satsuma woman was worth. She stood up, edged to the stairs and crept down step by step.

  The intruder hammered again, then began to shake the door. Panting in terror, hardly daring to breathe, she huddled in the shadows, wondering why, of all the houses on the street, he’d chosen this one. How could he have known there was anyone here? She watched, frozen, as the pale thread grew wider and daylight flooded in, speckled with dust and flies. A tall figure stepped inside edged with a fuzz of brightness, like a demon in a halo of flames, smelling of starch and boot polish and gun metal.

  She stared transfixed at the dark silhouette, wondering if she could make it back up the stairs. There were iron kettles and heavy vases up there she could throw at him or she could try to upend the trunk and heave it. But she was shaking so much her limbs simply refused to move.

  Then she made out features emerging from the shadows – a chiselled cheek, a fine, rather aristocratic nose, the curve of a full mouth – and realized with a shock it was not a demon at all. She knew that face. She’d seen it so often in her dreams.

  He’d come, her beloved Nobu, after all this time. Or was she seeing things? Could it possibly be him? Rooted to the spot, she clasped her hands and peered eagerly into the darkness.

 
She was about to jump up, race down the stairs, fling herself into his arms and shout, ‘You! It’s you!’ But then she saw an army uniform, a pair of white spats, the glint of buttons and the unmistakable shape of a rifle.

  Trembling, she fell back against the wall and clenched her fists, her head spinning. The young man she had prayed would come back to her had been a dreamer whose leggings and baggy cotton jackets never quite seemed to fit him. This was an enemy soldier. It wasn’t him at all. The gods had granted her prayer but they’d put a terrible sting in the tail.

  The intruder shut the door and darkness fell again like the sudden coming of night.

  ‘Taka.’ That voice, the beloved voice with its northern burr, the voice she’d so longed to hear. But it didn’t matter who he was, he was the enemy.

  She stumbled to her feet, leaning against the wall to steady herself, and felt for the dagger tucked in her obi. She would kill him and herself too. It was the only thing left to do.

  She opened her mouth but no sound came. She licked her lips. ‘Don’t come near me,’ she whispered.

  He was bending, fumbling with his spats. ‘Taka, Taka, I can’t believe it. Is it really you?’ His voice was shaking. She could hear his breathing, fast and shallow, loud in the silence. He was as shocked as she was.

  ‘Get out.’ Her voice was a croak. ‘You don’t belong here. We’re enemies. Get out.’

  She’d never felt such despair. She closed her hand around the silken binding of the hilt, slid the dagger from its scabbard and almost fell as she took a step towards him. She raised her arm. She would strike him and that would be the end of it.

  He looked at her steadily.

  ‘I never thought I’d find you.’ In the darkness his eyes were blazing. ‘I thank the gods you’re safe.’