The others gathered round, leering. After all, she realized, as far as they were concerned she was just a peasant girl. They could do anything they liked with impunity.
‘This one’s mine,’ chortled the pockmarked one, spraying her with spittle. ‘Spoils of war. Come along with us, girl. We’re the conquerors!’
Fiercely Sachi tried to push the soldier off, groping for her hairpin. For a moment she forgot everything except his vile sweaty body pinning her to the wall. She would have his eyes out, even if the soldiers killed them all.
Then she stopped. With a shock of horror she remembered there was a whole army out there. She couldn’t defend herself or she would bring down destruction on the village. Looking at these men with their brutish smell and sun-blackened skin, she had no doubt they would massacre them all.
The man was tearing at her clothes when Taki drew herself up and glared at the soldiers. Her big eyes were blazing and she didn’t even try to conceal her posh Kyoto accent. In her squeaky voice she shrilled in tones of withering contempt, ‘What are you – animals or men?’ Her voice rang out across the hubbub. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves. We are loyal subjects of the emperor here, but we’re not prepared to be ruled by wild beasts. So this is what southerners are! You burst in, frightening the children. I don’t know who or what you’re looking for but they’re not here. Can’t you see that? You’ve done enough damage. You southerners – you’re no better than animals!’
The men fell silent. Some were shuffling their feet and staring at the ground. The bearded soldier had returned to see what the commotion was. He pushed through the mob of soldiers, grabbed the pockmarked man by the shoulders and shoved him away. The man stumbled and fell.
‘You want your head chopped off?’ barked the bearded man. ‘You heard what the commander said. Leave these women alone. We’re supposed to be winning the locals over, not terrorizing them. There’s no one here. Let’s go.’
‘I’ll be back,’ said the pockmarked soldier, leering at Sachi. Still peering round suspiciously and grumbling under their breath, they all trooped out.
The door closed and the room was quiet again. Sachi and Taki looked at each other, both trembling with shock. Sachi had only just come back and already she had brought danger and destruction on her family, she thought.
‘We’d better make sure Shin stays up there,’ said Taki. ‘They’re bound to return. I thought you told me this place would be safe? It’s not safe at all.’
Much later Otama came in. ‘Those officers,’ she sighed. ‘They call for sake, then more sake, then for food, then more food. And will they pay for it? No. But what can we do? Anyway, they’re snoring now.’
She looked around enquiringly. Sachi and Taki had done their best to tidy up but there were gaping holes in the cupboard doors and the ceiling was shredded. Otama shook her head wearily and pursed her lips.
‘And your friend?’
Sachi glanced upwards.
Otama went to the kitchen, lifted the trapdoor in the floor and brought out a bowl of buckwheat groats. ‘This is all I have left,’ she said.
She threw some wood under the great cooking pot, boiled up the buckwheat and made a brown porridge. She ladled some into a couple of bowls, chopped a pickled radish, put a few slices on to two dishes and laid it on a tray with a couple of pairs of chopsticks. Slowly she straightened up, one hand on her back.
Sachi was looking at her questioningly. She could understand two bowls – Shinzaemon could well be hungry. But two pairs of chopsticks . . . ? Otama gave her a gentle smile but said nothing.
‘Give it to me,’ said Sachi.
She took the tray, picked up a lamp and padded through the dark house. She rolled the staircase into place, then knocked softly on the trapdoor in the ceiling and cautiously pushed it up a little.
‘Shin!’ she called.
She shoved the trapdoor back. Holding the lamp over her head she climbed a few more steps and peeked into the attic.
In the huge cluttered space with its sloping walls, she could see the underside of the roof slates neatly overlapping each other. She used to play hide and seek up there. Broken farm implements, piles of rope and ancient boxes loomed in the lamplight, casting huge shadows. It was icy cold. She held the lantern higher.
Shinzaemon was cross-legged in the middle of the dusty floor, wrapped up in a quilt. There was an unsheathed sword beside him. She blinked back tears as she saw him looking at her. His face was black with dust and grime.
‘You’re safe,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I was so frightened.’
‘I heard those southerners barging around downstairs,’ he said. ‘You did well. If you’d yelled I would have smashed my way out of here and had their heads, the lot of them.’
‘It’s a good thing you didn’t. If they’d known you were here they would have killed us all. I didn’t know you were so famous, you and that tattoo of yours.’
There was a noise – a sound of shuffling. Another set of teeth gleamed in the darkness. There was someone else there too. Squatting next to Shinzaemon was a long-limbed gangly youth. Sachi looked at him and gasped. He was taller and more muscular than when she had seen him last, and coarse black hair sprouted on his upper lip. But there was no mistaking the impish grin and bristly hair that stuck out in unruly tufts. She could almost see him scrambling fearlessly along the shakiest of branches or darting about in the river like a fish.
‘Genzaburo!’ she cried. ‘Gen! What are you doing here?’
‘I’d know that white skin anywhere,’ said Genzaburo. His voice was still slightly high-pitched, like a boy’s. He grinned at her like a mischievous water sprite.
‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ she said, shaking her head in bemused delight. ‘Not a bit. What on earth have you been up to?’
‘Staying alive,’ said Genzaburo. ‘We had to do some creeping about up here. There were spears poking up all over the place. It was like being at the wrong end of a bayonet charge. Danced about until we found a couple of beams and squatted on them. Shin wanted to get down there and take them all on. I had to restrain him.’
Shinzaemon was looking at Sachi.
‘You expect me to stay up here and leave you to deal with those brutes alone?’ he grunted. In the lamplight the pair of them could almost have been brothers. They looked far too young to have required a squadron of southern soldiers to flush them out.
Later, when they had patched up the damage as best they could and spread out their futons, Otama whispered to Sachi, ‘I heard those southerners talking about some gangster or other. Is that your friend?’
‘It’s all exaggeration. He came with us to protect us.’
‘No need to explain. You’re our Sa. That’s all we need to know. And that Genzaburo,’ she added, smiling quietly. ‘Rampaging up and down the valley, having a one-man war with the southerners. I don’t know how many he’s cut down. Anyway, we have to protect our own.’
Sachi looked at her. Otama’s hair was growing thin and sparse, her knuckles were swollen, her face was wrinkled, but she radiated calm and kindness and strength. It made Sachi angry that, after all her years of hard work, she now had to suffer these uncouth southerners strutting around destroying everything that she had built with such pain.
‘So those southern officers are using our inn?’
‘We’ve got no choice. Your father was notified they’d be on their way. We were ordered to arrange bedding and food. The place was falling down. We’d given up using it as an inn ever since the processions stopped coming through. When was it? Four years ago? Five? No one came to stay any more. Ordinary travellers couldn’t afford it. No guests and twenty rooms to keep up. I’ve been sweeping and polishing, trying to tidy it up, but it’s very shabby.
‘You remember how we used to scrub the tatami together and arrange the flowers in the alcove when the lords were due to stay? You were so good at doing the flowers, Sa. You used to enjoy that. And Father sitting down there, chatting to their lordships? Th
ey were so noble, so dignified, those lords. They always came through on the same day, every year without fail. We knew exactly how many men they’d have with them, how much food to provide, how much bedding. Everything was set. Everything was organized and planned. And we got paid for it, enough to get by . . .’
There was a long silence. Finally she said, ‘There’s been famine, Sa. The crops have been bad every year since you left.’
There was another silence. Sachi had the feeling there was something Otama wasn’t telling her.
Late that night the door slid open and a large figure appeared. He threw himself down on the tatami along with everyone else. Sachi knew it was her father but it was too late to talk. When she woke up in the morning he had gone, along with Shinzaemon and Genzaburo.
By daylight Sachi could see that the southerners had left the place a shambles. Burnt-out torches littered the road. The banks of the drainage channels had crumbled under the passage of so many men and horses. The ground was a morass of trodden-down snow, churned and rutted from the wheels of the cannon carriages. Children rushed around sweeping up horse manure, straw sandals and straw horseshoes.
Sachi went out to help her mother tidy up. She kept a wary eye out for the pockmarked soldier. Standing in the morning sun, she couldn’t help noticing how run-down and dingy the village had become. It was poorer and smaller than she remembered. The whole of it would have fitted into the compound of the Satos’ house in Kano, and the whole city of Kano would fit easily inside the ramparts of Edo Castle.
Edo Castle. Sachi felt a pang of longing. She suddenly realized she no longer belonged in the village. She was no longer the innocent girl who had played so merrily, for whom the village was the whole world. With a sigh she forced herself back into the present and joined the villagers fixing up the road.
Everyone was chattering as they worked. It seemed the daughter of a local watchman had been raped while doing some washing in the stream. One of the southern soldiers had been unable to resist her pretty face. He had been apprehended and killed. Local men were bringing the head in a bucket. It was to be stuck on a bamboo stake and displayed at the edge of the village for three days, along with a notice describing the offence and the punishment. It was an extraordinarily severe punishment for something not usually even considered a crime. After all, the victim was only a woman, and a peasant at that. No doubt the idea was to show the villagers that they would be protected under the new regime.
Sachi felt a certain grim satisfaction. Perhaps it was the pockmarked man.
Word had already spread of her return. Villagers came over to greet her and to have a good look at this child who had disappeared for more than six years and returned a great lady.
‘Sa, how are you? Remember me?’ It was a woman with a mouth that looked too big for her face, crowded with crooked teeth. She had a baby tied to her back and a couple of toddlers clinging to her shabby, patched work clothes. ‘It’s me, Shigé!’
Shigé – Genzaburo’s brother’s wife and the young bride of the inn across the road. Sachi remembered how much in awe of her she had been. She had been the queen of the village, so pretty and full of gaiety. Now her face had grown thick and fleshy, her cheeks were cracked and blackened from the sun, her forehead was furrowed and her back was already beginning to bend at the waist. How had she grown so old so fast?
Kumé, the crippled bride of the clog-maker’s son, came limping over. She too had turned into an old woman. Only Oman from the inn next door to Sachi’s retained a little of her youthful prettiness. Her face still had some of its soft roundness but she too looked tired and worn. Her hands were swollen and chapped and her cheeks criss-crossed with red veins.
Sachi looked at them all, standing around smiling and laughing. They did not need to say a word. She knew exactly how their lives had been in the six years since she saw them last. They had had children year after year. Some had died; they had reared the rest. They had taken care of the guests at their inns, cooked, cleaned, lugged water from the well, washed clothes in the river, dug their vegetable patches. And her life? They could not begin even to imagine it.
‘Look at you,’ exclaimed Shigé. ‘So young, like a princess in a fairy tale!’
‘When people passed through we always asked how things were in Edo. We wanted to make sure you were safe,’ said Oman. ‘We worried about you, hearing about the troubles up there. But we’ve had troubles of our own here too.’
They asked no more about what she had done or where she had been. Perhaps they too were afraid to look too deep into the chasm that divided them. Sachi thought of Urashima, the handsome young fisherman in the fairy tale, who was wooed by the dragon king’s daughter. He had frittered away three years at her palace under the sea, dancing and feasting and love-making. When he returned to his village, everything had changed. Finally he met an old, old woman who remembered hearing, when she was a little child, of the man who had disappeared into the sea. Not three but three hundred years had passed.
Sachi had been away too long. Too much had happened in all their lives. They had moved too far apart ever to close the gap. She had wanted so badly to go back, just as Urashima had, but it was too late. The village had been like an anchor for her, the place she had thought of as home. But it was not the place she remembered. She really was Urashima.
The story had had a bad ending. The dragon king’s daughter had given Urashima a box and told him on no account to open it, no matter what. Sitting disconsolate on the beach, it occurred to him that her gift was the only thing he had left. He decided to open it. A wisp of smoke curled out. It was those three hundred years. As he sat on the beach his hair grew white then his body crumbled away. In a moment there was nothing left but a pile of dust.
III
Sachi’s father, Jiroemon, was sitting, legs crossed, by the hearth when she got back. Shinzaemon and Genzaburo were with him. Threads of smoke coiled from three small long-stemmed pipes. The faces that gazed at each other across the coals were very serious.
‘Declared a traitor, huh?’ said Jiroemon. ‘They’ll be asking for his head next.’
‘They already have,’ grunted Shinzaemon. Sachi lingered in the doorway. So they were talking about the retired shogun, Lord Yoshinobu, she thought. She stood motionless, listening to Shinzaemon’s deep tones. She loved the sound of his voice when he thought there were no women around, the rough men’s language he used, the way he growled out the syllables. ‘They’ve got armies on all three highways, closing in on Edo,’ Shinzaemon was saying. ‘They’re sweeping up the domains as they go. The lords are all declaring for the south. They’re afraid of being branded traitors if they don’t.’
They stopped talking when they saw her.
‘I’m back,’ Sachi said simply.
Taki had been kneeling silently in a far corner of the room. Otama had given her some sewing to do; she only felt comfortable when she had a needle in her fingers, she said.
In the morning, after the last of the soldiers had left, Taki had gone to sit in the great inn for a while. She said she felt more at home in the big rooms with their gold-edged tatami, old and worn though it was. She had also been to gaze at the ornamental garden. But she wouldn’t go out and mix with the people. Sachi wouldn’t have expected her to. She was a court lady, used to living hidden away in shadowy interiors.
Now Taki slipped forward and joined them quietly. She made a pot of tea and poured out a cup for each of them, then sat down.
Jiroemon bowed as if he was slightly bemused at having a court lady make him a cup of tea. Then he turned to Sachi.
‘It’s good to see you, my girl,’ he said. ‘My little princess. You bring sunshine.’
He poked the coals and put another plug of tobacco into the small bowl of his pipe. He at least had not changed. He looked older, stiffer, slower. His thatch of hair, tugged back into a bristly horse’s tail, was streaked with grey. But he was still the large, dependable father she remembered, his voice as deep and reassuring as
ever. She looked at his huge hand, the nails blackened and chipped, and remembered how safe it had made her feel when she held it as a child.
‘These are dark times,’ he said slowly. ‘Very dark. I knew things were changing but I never thought they would change so much. We’ve all been hungry, some years worse than others. The price of rice has gone through the roof. And our taxes too. Half our young men have gone to fight. Most haven’t come back. I do my best to keep order, but it’s hard.’
He looked around at Shinzaemon and Genzaburo.
‘Some of our young men come back and they’re even more trouble when they get here,’ he added with a chuckle. ‘And other young men turn up bringing trouble in their wake. Genzaburo here, he’s been gone for a long time, he has. The gods know what he’s been up to!’
‘I ran away,’ said Genzaburo, grinning his impish grin. ‘Joined the militia. Didn’t fancy being an innkeeper for the rest of my days or chopping down trees either, just to hand it all over in taxes to this lordship or that lordship. Was a time you had to be a samurai to join up but they’ll take anyone these days, even a peasant. I can fight better than a samurai now.’
‘Is that so?’ grunted Shinzaemon, giving him a sideways glance. ‘We’ll see about that.’
‘I can ride a horse. I fought in Kyoto. I’ve seen the world.’
‘And Shin,’ said Jiroemon. ‘Quite a legend round here. We never thought we’d meet you.’
‘We knew each other in Kyoto,’ said Shinzaemon, ‘Gen and I. Fought shoulder to shoulder a few times. It was a big surprise to find him up there in the attic. But I’m afraid neither of us were much use last night.’
‘And you, Sa?’ said Genzaburo. ‘The village was empty without you. Look at you – so beautiful. Who would have thought it? Our own little Sa. You’re like a fairy creature.’
Sachi looked down, flushing, conscious of Shinzaemon’s eyes on her face. There was a wistful note to Genzaburo’s voice, as if he was aware she was no longer the person she had been.