‘You know it’s a criminal offence, stealing state funds,’ said Daisuké grimly. ‘If we find them and they do have the gold, I’ll make sure their heads are well and truly off their shoulders – once they’ve finished answering my questions. They’re traitors, that’s what they are.’
Sachi could feel Shinzaemon bristling.
‘Rebellion. Treachery,’ he muttered with a curl of his lip. His face was stony and Sachi could see that he was making a mighty effort to keep silent. She could guess what he was thinking. If Lord Oguri and Lord Mizuno were organizing the resistance, Shinzaemon would have to make a rapid decision about which side he was on – whether he was with Daisuké or against him. Disillusioned or not, she doubted if he was ready to betray his principles quite yet.
III
They reached the village late in the afternoon. It was huddled against the mountainside. A forest of cedars loomed behind, casting deep shadows across the wooden walls and steep thatched roofs of the inns, and strands of mountain mist trailed in the hollows.
For such a remote place it seemed strangely busy. Shifty-eyed men with stubbly faces and greasy hair pulled into knots prowled around while shrivelled maids, aprons tied over their indigo work kimonos, bustled out into the street, grabbing them and hauling them into their inns. Sachi guessed business must be bad if they had to drag in low life like that.
Out on the street some of the men had already started drinking and the air was rank with the fumes of the local brew. Sachi overheard snatches of conversation. ‘Set up as a merchant, that’s what I’ll do.’ ‘Not me. I’ll be down the Yoshiwara where you can’t tell day from night. The most beautiful women in all two hundred and sixty provinces!’ ‘I’ll buy a few for mistresses.’ ‘I’ll put it on the dice. There’ll be no stopping me.’ She wondered what they were talking about.
Daisuké sought out the best inn in town and took a room there. It was a big wooden building with hefty smoke-blackened beams in the entrance hall that reminded Sachi of the inn where she had grown up. She slid open the rain doors. Outside there was a tiny garden with a pond with carp swimming in it and a few rocks covered in bright green moss.
After they had bathed, a bent old maid hobbled in to prepare their room for dinner. She was dressed in a kimono of coarse homespun cotton, with her hair tied in place with hemp yarn, and stared at them suspiciously out of tiny eyes sunk in her crinkled face. Sachi realized how outlandish they must look: three aristocratic-looking women, two men with hair eccentrically cropped and a huge red-headed barbarian – and all of them speaking with strong city accents. The woman peered up at Edwards then made a tutting noise and turned away as if the presence of such an alien being was too much even to think about.
‘Down from Edo, are you?’ she asked. She had almost no teeth, which made it even harder to understand the ‘shu shu shu’ of her grating northern burr. ‘Used to be we didn’t see no grand folks like you one year to the next. Can’t imagine what you’re doing here. Not on the way to nowhere. No hotspring, no famous temple.’
‘I’m on my way back from Wakamatsu,’ said Shinzaemon quietly. ‘My friends here have come to meet me.’
‘Wakamatsu, huh?’ A long rumble of awe and appreciation rose in the woman’s throat and her old face softened. For a moment there was a flash of the young girl she must once have been. ‘Well done,’ she croaked. ‘Well done. Fought well, you boys. Held out. Did your best.’
She heaved herself to her feet, limped out and returned with a tray laden with tiny dishes. She folded her legs under her and placed it in front of Daisuké.
‘We’ve had our troubles too. His lordship . . .’ She shook her head and drew her breath through her few remaining teeth with a hiss.
‘You mean . . .’ Sachi held her breath.
‘Yes, yes, Lord Oguri,’ the old woman rasped impatiently. ‘You must have heard of him. Important man, his lordship, up in the city. Never used to see his lordship from one year to the next. Mind you, he was a fair man. If any of us townsfolk had a complaint, he’d listen to it. My old grandfather used to be a retainer up at the big house, and I was a wet nurse for his lordship when he was a baby. Then they sent him down to the Edo estate to turn him into a warrior. I never saw him again. But we all heard what an important man he’d become. We were all proud of him.’
‘So his lordship . . .’
She waggled her head from side to side. ‘You won’t believe what happened.’ She sniffed. ‘When was it now? Before the riceplanting season. Well before. Would have been before the flower festival, except we didn’t celebrate the flower festival this year. How could we after what happened?’
She hobbled out and returned with another tray which she set before Edwards. There was silence in the room. Sachi glanced around; everyone was looking at the floor. Like her, no one dared break the spell by asking where Lord Oguri was.
The old woman went out a third time and returned with another tray of food. As she placed it before Shinzaemon she smiled at him.
‘Bear meat,’ she croaked. ‘Gave you a couple of extra slices. For Wakamatsu.’ Her ancient face crinkled up like a walnut. ‘We had those southern soldiers here too,’ she muttered. ‘Right here in this village. Mean-looking characters. Bow legs. Strange clothes. Can’t understand a word they’re saying. They headed straight for his lordship’s. We didn’t even know he was back. They fan out, they’re searching every house. Even here. Look. See what they did?’
The interwoven bamboo of the ceiling was in shreds. It must have been stabbed a thousand times, as if the soldiers had been sure their prey was up in the rafters somewhere, hiding.
‘ “He’s not here,” we said. “Never comes here. He’s up in Edo.” “He’s here all right,” they said. Could understand that much. Before the rice-planting season, that’s when it was.’
She stopped and swabbed her rheumy old eyes with her sleeve. ‘Turns out they were right. Seems his lordship and his young lordship were here. They weren’t gonna run away, were they, proud men like them! They were up at the big house, waiting. Guess they knew what was coming. Soldiers arrested them, and his lordship’s personal servants too, and marched them down to the river bank. Chopped their heads off right there.’
Sachi stifled a gasp. Lord Oguri’s soft courtier’s face, the colour of vellum, flashed before her eyes. She saw his white scholarly hands – the hands of a man who had never wielded anything heavier than a writing brush.
The old woman was wiping tears from her shrivelled cheeks.
‘Nailed his lordship’s head to a board,’ she quavered. ‘Carried it through the village, as a warning, like. We belong to his lordship, they know which side we’re on. I saw it myself. First time I saw his lordship’s face since he was a baby. Such a noble face. Nailed it to the prison gate with a sign. “Traitor to the emperor”. He was no traitor. We’re his retainers. And proud of it. Proud.’
She started as if she’d suddenly realized what she’d said and glanced around nervously. Her mouth snapped shut and she hurried out of the room. She scuttled in and out with the remaining trays without another word.
Not hungry any longer, Sachi sat picking at the wild mushrooms and bean paste soup, trying to grasp what the woman had said.
It was Edwards who broke the silence.
‘So what happened to Lord Mizuno?’ he asked, stretching out one long leg, then the other, then folding them in front of him with a grimace.
‘Well,’ said Daisuké slowly, ‘we know he came over on the ferry with Lord Oguri. And, if it really was the Tokugawa gold they were carrying, he knows about it.’
‘He probably knows where it is, too,’ said Edwards. Sachi noticed the same gleam in his eye, the same sudden look of urgency, of intense interest, that she had seen the first time gold was mentioned. ‘In fact, if Lord Oguri is dead, he’s the only one who does. If that was the Tokugawa gold, those porters you saw are dead. They would have been killed the moment they got the gold to wherever their lordships wanted it to be.’
>
If. So many ‘if’s, Sachi thought. Yet she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of excitement.
‘Surely Lord Oguri and Lord Mizuno would have separated as soon as they’d got rid of the gold,’ said Shinzaemon. He leaned forward, his eyes shining. ‘They would have hidden it somewhere then gone in opposite directions. Lord Oguri would have known his life was in danger. Lord Mizuno too. They would have wanted to make sure at least one of them survived, otherwise the gold would be lost for ever.’
‘What makes you think they’d want to share it?’ demanded Edwards. ‘Maybe both of them wanted it. Maybe one of them cheated the other and went off with it. Maybe Lord Mizuno betrayed Lord Oguri and told the soldiers where to find him. Gold drives men crazy.’ He was staring at the tatami. ‘Rabu too,’ he muttered. ‘But in the end sometimes it’s better just to admit defeat.’
Shinzaemon and Daisuké looked at him. Sachi hoped no one but she understood what he was talking about.
‘We don’t even know there is any gold,’ said Taki hastily, breaking the silence.
‘Then why are all these men hanging around the village?’ Shinzaemon asked. ‘They’re after something – I can feel it.’
‘But we still have no idea where Lord Mizuno is or even whether he’s alive,’ Sachi objected. ‘Supposing he did the same as Lord Oguri? Supposing he fled to his home village? It’s at the other end of the country – isn’t that what you told me, Haru?’
‘It’s in Shingu, in the country of Kii.’
‘If he’s there, we’ve come in entirely the wrong direction,’ said Taki with a sigh. ‘We’ll have to go back to Edo and start all over again. Or just give up.’
‘I’d like to find out what’s happening in this village,’ said Shinzaemon. ‘I’m sure there’s a link somewhere to Lord Mizuno. After all, we know he came this way. Where was he when Lord Oguri was killed? What did he do then?’
They were all silent as the old woman came in to clear away their dishes. She crept over on her knees to pick up Shinzaemon’s tray then stopped and twisted her neck until she was looking up at him.
‘Wakamatsu, huh?’ she muttered in her creaky old voice. ‘Let me look at you. You did good, you boys. First time I’ve had the chance to see one of you boys.’
She put a withered claw on his knee and pushed her wizened face close to his. Shinzaemon cocked his head and looked at her with his slanted eyes.
‘Tell me, Granny,’ he said. ‘All these men out on the street here, hanging round the village. You tell us there’s no hotspring or famous temple, but there must be something to draw these fellows.’
‘Ne’er-do-wells, the lot of them,’ the old woman croaked. ‘Turn up every evening, drink the place dry. Plenty of business for the geishas and prostitutes, that’s for sure. But I don’t like it. This used to be a quiet place, no one ever came here. Just pilgrims on their way to the mountain. First those ruffians, now you – even an honourable barbarian,’ she added, squinting up at Edwards. She shook her head. ‘Never happened before, that’s for sure.’
She knelt quietly for a while, her head bobbing. Her chin sank lower and lower till Sachi was afraid she’d fallen asleep. Then she straightened up slowly.
‘It began not long after his lordship passed away,’ she said. ‘Around rice-planting time. They started to turn up – first one, then another, then more and more. Rowdy types – gamblers, yakuza, even outcastes, some of them. They don’t come in the daytimes, just the evenings. You get fights on the street sometimes. Never used to be like that.’
‘So no one knows why they’re here or what they’re up to?’ Shinzaemon persisted.
‘I don’t worry about that sort of thing. Not my business. Got too much to worry about already. You should ask my old man. He’s been up on the mountain a few times to take a look around. Tells me there’s something going on up there. He’ll take you if you want.’
IV
The old woman’s husband appeared early the next morning. He looked even older than his wife, as if he had weathered several lifetimes of rain, wind and snow. He was dressed for the mountains in straw boots and a straw raincoat, with a sedge hat hanging on his back and a staff in his gnarled hand. He tramped off, chattering excitedly in his barely comprehensible dialect, while Sachi and her companions hurried to keep up with him.
He led them up the hillside into the woods, along a rough path that looked as if it had been hacked out very recently. Soon they were picking their way between densely packed trees wound about with vines and swathed in foliage. They passed a cluster of fallen branches put together to make a shelter, then another and another, propped between the trees.
‘Some of these fellows live out ’ere,’ said the old man in a low voice.
Then they heard the sound of shovelling. The path opened into a clearing riddled with holes and heaped with piles of earth, like the casts of a gigantic worm. Scrawny men were bent over, digging feverishly. Some were in ragged indigo work trousers like peasants, while others wore nothing but loincloths despite the icy wind that shook the branches and sent leaves spinning. They looked up as the old man approached followed by Sachi and her companions. Sachi noticed Shinzaemon and Edwards putting their hands on the hilts of their pistols.
The men’s eyes swivelled as they saw Edwards.
‘What’s that?’ muttered one. ‘A tengu?’ They shrank back, their mouths open and their gums bared.
‘Nah, that’s no tengu,’ said another. ‘It’s one of them barbarians.’ The men circled around them, staring at them with glittering eyes, like wolves.
‘Oi, Granddad. What you doing bringing strangers round here?’ growled a skinny man with a thin twisted face and squinting eyes. He bent down and picked up a stone. ‘Keep away,’ he snarled, spewing a gobbet of yellow spit on to the ground. ‘Bloody samurai.’
‘Find your own patch,’ snarled another. ‘Yeah, that’s it. Clear off!’
Once they were well past, Shinzaemon muttered to the old man, ‘Gold they’re looking for, is it?’
The man narrowed his eyes to slits and clamped his lips together.
‘So there are no fellows with gold to spend hanging around the village, then?’ Shinzaemon persisted.
The old man grinned. ‘Not so far,’ he said, relenting. ‘They’ve not had much luck so far – you can see that. There’s more men digging further up the mountain. You might see something interesting up there.’
As they climbed on, the path disappeared altogether and the woods closed in around them. They clambered over rocks and fallen treetrunks, scrambling through bushes and piles of leaves and around great gnarled roots. They climbed in a sort of twilight, under a thick canopy of branches and leaves.
Above them the woods came to an end and light glimmered through the trees. They came out on to moorland – an endless field of pale dry miscanthus grass that swayed high above their heads, rustling in the wind. Withered fields. It made Sachi think of the haiku poet Basho’s death poem:
Tabi ni yande
Ill on a journey
yume wa kareno o
My dreams wander on
kakemeguru
Across withered fields.
The old man was out in front, tramping along with Daisuké, Shinzaemon and Edwards right behind him. Daisuké and Shinzaemon strode along together, their broad shoulders side by side, their cropped heads – one greying, one glossy and black – close. Taki and Haru followed, their white headbands bobbing through the grass.
Sachi could hear the old man’s voice: ‘A lot of strange things happen on this moor. There was a story my granddad told me, about a traveller. Got lost up here one night. Was wandering around and met a woman. A real beauty.’
Sachi could guess how the story went; it was always the same. The woman lures the traveller back to her mansion, somewhere deep in the moors. The next day, enthralled by her beauty, he goes back to look for her. He searches and searches but all he can find where the mansion had been is a gravestone many hundreds of years old, covered
in moss. He looks at it closely and sees her name carved on it. Sachi shivered. Ghosts – she didn’t want to hear about ghosts. It was tempting fate, especially now, when they were searching for her mother, desperately hoping they would find her. She fell back a little, let the others get ahead.
She ran her fingers through the tall grass, watching the down spin off and float in the breeze. The sky was dark and gloomy and clouds scudded overhead. There was snow in the air. She tugged her robes closer around her. She could hear the grass swishing as she brushed through it and the rustle of her straw sandals on the ground.
Then she heard another sound – a rhythmic thunk and a sort of tapping, like a ghost knocking from under the earth. She started, overcome with superstitious dread, then held her breath and listened. It was not a ghost at all, she realized. It was digging, the crunch of a shovel biting into hard ground followed by the rattle of earth being thrown. It was a little way away, somewhere out in the long grass. The others were not far ahead, cutting a furrow across the moor. It would just take a moment to have a look and then she could catch up with them.
She was pushing through the tall stalks, following the sound, when she suddenly found herself on the edge of a huge hole. She stopped abruptly. It was big and wide and deep, big enough for the burial of a shogun.
There was a man inside, digging feverishly, so engrossed he hadn’t noticed her approach. He was panting hard, slamming a shovel into the earthen wall of the pit, hurling shovelfuls of dirt to one side. He was thin and ragged, his hair unkempt and matted. His back was burned black from the sun, and despite the chill in the air it glistened with sweat. His skinny shoulder bones jutted like wings, moving under his dirt-encrusted skin as he worked. He had a ragged towel knotted around his head and scrawny ankles protruding from grimy work trousers. There was an overpowering stench of sweat and urine and human excrement.