Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (23 page)

Ichiro did not know what to do. If he drew his short sword he would either kill Kyuzo or be killed by him, he understood that well enough, but what should he do, where did the right path lie? He was still thinking about it when the older samurai came back out of the bar. His legs were still shaky but his embarrassment had steadied the steel of his blade.

Kyuzo knew he had acted rashly with the phlegm and was sorry. He had seen too many men embittered at the ends of their lives to want to have a part in helping this one meet his ancestors, and he put his sword away. “I know how you feel,” he said, “but over the years we masterless men have had far worse things shoved down our throats.”

Those were the truest words he could find, and he bowed, hoping they would suffice as an apology.

The older man didn't respond, yet his eyes did turn briefly inward, as if gazing upon an earlier part of his life. Perhaps that is why his attack was surer than Kyuzo expected. It made him jump and turn in a wide circle, his dash for safety momentarily erasing the taste of the phlegm from the other man's mouth. Manjiro pulled Ace and Ned back from the line of battle, and with the same quickness he'd used to put it there, Ichiro snatched his sword from his fallen comrade's thigh. When the older man attacked again Kyuzo deflected his blade. He knew how to fight this man, but, like Ichiro with his question of honor, he did not so clearly know what was right. Should he keep on deflecting his thrusts or simply strike his own blade home?

It must have taken a great deal of effort, but while everyone else's attention was thusly focused, the wounded samurai got to his feet and, with his own sword finally drawn, hobbled toward the fighters. Kyuzo knew that if Ichiro joined the battle, too, he would be in trouble, but Ichiro was so lost in thought that he seemed hardly able to take in the fact that there had been a change in the equation. Kyuzo expected the younger man's attack to coincide with the next by the older one, and had just decided to kill them both when, instead of running toward him, the younger man lunged at Manjiro and the Americans.

“Watch out!” Kyuzo cried, but though Ace and Manjiro jumped back, the samurai's blade came down over the unmoving Ned's forehead and, precisely along the lines that had been painted there, perfectly severed his nose.

To those Japanese who had seen them firsthand, the worst feature of the American face was its pronounced and ugly nose, but infinitely worse was to suddenly see a face without one. Manjiro screamed and Ichiro threw his hands up over his eyes, and Kyuzo and the old man he was fighting both gasped like geisha. For his part, however, Ned just stood there, his eyes growing larger and his cheeks widening out, like all of his features were painted on a plate.

Nothing would have made the old samurai stop fighting Kyuzo save the fact that this wild sight left him retching and bent over, an evening's worth of cheap saké, and the phlegm, too, dislodged from his belly. The young samurai's inrention was also thwarted, for though he intended to kill the others after cutting Ned, his success in the first part of his plan so surprised him that he abandoned the second, pausing just long enough to lift Ned's nose out of the dirt, before turning and limping away. And in a minute the old man wiped the vomit from his mouth and followed him.

Ichiro stayed where he was, fixed in mortification, until Ned slumped into Manjiro's waiting arms. And that pitiful sight was what decided him, severing, as clearly as Ned's nose had been, his ties to those two fleeing men and his loyalty to Ueno.

“Young Kambei,” he said. “Go into the bar for some towels.”

In another situation his words would have been improper, for Manjiro's station was far above his own, but as it was Manjiro and Kyuzo both hurried into the bar, and came back out again with rags pulled from a bucket of cold water. Ichiro took one and folded it and tried to show it to Ned, who looked up at him and said, “I don't feel no pain.”

Ichiro worked the towel beneath Ned's fingers and he and Kyuzo each took an elbow, pulling Ned up. They followed Manjiro and Ace out of the bar street, then cut between two buildings and onto the forest path at the bottom of the hill, carrying Ned up a switchback trail.

At a clearing near the castle they stopped to rest, subduing their heavy breathing, until only Ned could be heard above the whisper of the wind that had come up.

He was freely crying by then, and kneeling before the others with his eyes open, staring over his own laced fingers and the lumpy mound of towel.

27
.
Twenty Questions

TSUNE AND HER NIECES
had not gone to bed early that night and were in a first floor room playing word games. Masako was “it” and had chosen a word that began with a certain Chinese character containing seven brushstrokes which, when put together with another seven-stroke character, depicted an embarrassing situation. Tsune and Keiko were irritated by the vagueness of Masako's hints but were asking questions anyway, for if they failed to guess the word in twenty tries they would have to take their hair down and walk out onto the castle grounds under the chilly April rain that had just come up. That was the punishment Masako had endured when she lost the last game, and she still looked bedraggled.

A scratching sound had been coming from outside the castle for quite a while and Masako said it was made by the ghost of the first Lord Okubo, who, everyone knew, sometimes haunted the family during rainstorms. The first Lord Okubo had died, legend had it, during the longest drought in Japanese history, and therefore liked to walk around the castle with his head turned up and his mouth open. Masako reminded Keiko that they had seen him once when they were younger, and that he was not likely to remove Keiko from the list of those he would haunt simply because she now considered herself an adult.

“He wouldn't bother us in normal weather,” she admitted, “but he'll find you and scare that haughty attitude of yours out of you if you're out tonight.”

Keiko and Tsune were exchanging glances. They had only one remaining guess in the current game and what they were telling each other was that they would accuse Masako of cheating if they guessed wrong. They would say her hints were misleading or that the word didn't have enough of the sense of embarrassment to it, or simply that it was time for bed. In any event both of them had decided not to go outside in the rain.

“But what is that scratching?” Tsune asked. “Really, there isn't a tree, is there, that could reach this high up the castle wall? I think you should go look, Masako. Perhaps the first Lord Okubo's ghost is standing on stilts at the window with the answer to your question, and if that's the case it would be fruitless for Keiko or me to go for we wouldn't know whether his answer was right or wrong.”

“I'm not stupid, Auntie,” Masako said, but the issue of the scratching had taken hold of her imagination. So while the others pretended to discuss what her word might be, she walked to the edge of the room to listen. The windows on the castle's upper floors were only wide enough to shoot an arrow out of, but in a recent remodeling some of those on this first floor had been widened to provide a better view and better ventilation. When Masako opened this one, however, she discovered that it was still shuttered from the outside. They had all arrived in such a deep depression over Manjiro that no one had thought to properly air the place out.

“I'm not stupid, but I am tired of waiting for you two,” she said, “so I think I will go out for just a second. And when I come back I'll want your last guess with no excuses. Don't say I'm cheating or I'll scream and wake up everyone.”

The castle had wide hallways on the first floor and when Masako stepped out of the room Tsune and Keiko jumped up like cats to follow her. If they could catch her walking far enough away from the main door they might sneak after her and hide, yelling like the first Lord Okubo's ghost when she came back past them. Keiko knew that normally she had to be careful with tricks at this time of night, but with her aunt in on it, even in their state of grief, she was prepared to be more daring than normal.

Masako had gone quickly through the hallway because she was afraid of its echo. She unbolted the main door and took an umbrella and stepped into waiting
geta
. And just as her aunt and sister hoped she might, she left the door open, oblivious to the wind and rain that came inside. As soon as she walked down the stone staircase and around the bend of the castle wall, Tsune and Keiko took the single remaining umbrella and followed her, smiling like devils and leaning into each other.

“We shouldn't frighten her too severely,” warned Keiko. “It won't be worth it if we wake Grandfather up.”

When Masako got to the first set of shutters, which were more than thirty feet above her, she was no longer sure that they were the right ones. And in any case there was nothing next to the shutters that could make such a scratching noise, so she soon walked on.

“Oh, first Lord Okubo, are you haunting us now?” she called, on the off chance that she had been followed.

Tsune and Keiko stifled their giggles, and pressed themselves against the wall.

But the next set of shutters was such a long way off that before Masako got halfway to them, she turned back. She stopped and listened, to see if she could still hear the scratching, and what she heard instead was an actual human voice.

“Do not be frightened, Masako,” it said.

“Ayai!”
she gasped, leaping and dropping her umbrella.

It was a man's voice, so not a trick played on her by her aunt or sister. At least that's what she thought until her aunt and sister suddenly appeared behind her, themselves surprised to see her stopped, halfway between the two sets of windows, her umbrella pitching toward them like a pinwheel. Tsune expertly caught it up.

“You devils!” Masako cried, but the man's voice said, “Please, all of you, listen. Do not shout again and do not run away. This is an emergency!”

“Who's there?” asked Keiko. “Who have you got with you, Masako?” But Tsune passed both umbrellas over to her elder niece, stepped out into the rain and said most seriously, “Is that you, Manjiro?”

He was in the very clearing that Einosuke had chosen for his garden, standing within its thin rope cordon. Tsune pulled the bottom of her kimono up, and stepped over the string. She touched Manjiro's arm and held his gaze until the moonlight came into his eyes, telling her he was unharmed.

“Where are they?” she whispered. “Has something gone wrong?”

“There has been an accident,” said Manjiro. “One of them is bleeding in the marsh.”

To him it seemed a terrible thing to have to say, an admission of defeat that reflected back to all the other mistakes he had made. But he spoke without emotion, trying to remember how much better off he was than Ned.

“We need bandages and medicine and blankets. We need a doctor and we need fire, something with which to cauterize a most horrific wound. We need food and changes of clothing for five…”

The girls had come forward but stayed on the other side of the cordon.

“I want to talk to Einosuke if he'll allow it,” Manjiro said. He turned as he spoke, as if expecting Ueno's soldiers to come riding up the main road from town. But nothing was visible anywhere save the rain and the darkness through which it fell.

“It would be better if you brought them here, easier than for us to try to carry everything down to the marsh,” said Tsune. “And leave Einosuke alone for the moment. Why don't you speak directly to your father?”

Tsune knew as well as Manjiro did that in the end Einosuke would help him, but she also knew that he would do so only after using precious time, to brood and think things over. And she had seen a change in Lord Okubo since her arrival from Edo, some fundamental alteration in his perception.

“My father is a repeater of edicts,” Manjiro said, surprised by his own returning bitterness. He looked beyond Tsune at his nieces but did not apologize.

“Yes, well, I have often thought so of all such lords,” said Tsune. “But why don't you try him anyway? I have an intuition.”

Manjiro well remembered their visit to the Barbarian Book Room and to the Pavilion of Timelessness, how she had jeopardized their chance for a happy marriage with her intuition before. Still, though only a moment earlier he would not have considered waking his father for anything, because the words suggesting it had come from Tsune's precious mouth, it now seemed entirely right.

“He is no doubt sleeping,” he said.

“He is but I will wake him,” said Tsune. “You, in the meantime, bring your companions to the stable and the girls will set about finding what you need.”

She turned and said, “Won't you girls?” and her nieces nodded.

So it was that, though they had gone outside in search of frivolous games, all three women reentered the castle with a new and serious purpose. Masako said she knew where they kept the medical supplies, and Keiko that in a room on the casde's third floor there were endless stacks of old kimono. Both girls hurried off, lest the frightful task of waking their grandfather somehow fall to them instead of Tsune.

When they were gone Tsune walked up the flights of castle stairs slowly, not out of fear but out of wondering how it would be to see Kyuzo and Manjiro together again.

At the top of each flight she stopped and looked through the narrow window slits at the rain and the far off ocean with its broad expanse of darkness. On its surface she thought she could see ships, perhaps the Americans passing on their way to Shimoda, and directly below her, at the entrance to the stables, she saw more clearly the figures of five men.

After that she went faster up the stairs, choosing correctly, without having seen it before, Lord Okubo's room.

28
.
Allergic to Pain

THOUGH LORD OKUBO
hadn't heard any of the outside goings-on, he was not asleep, for the cuts he had made on his abdomen were inflamed, itching like the nervous rash that had plagued him as a child. He was, in fact, sitting by a candle in a loincloth, examining those cuts, when Tsune came in and told him her news.