The Last Concubine (46 page)

Now she knew very well that the emperor was a holy being who lived in seclusion in Kyoto and communed with the gods to ensure that the country was prosperous and crops were good. With a pang of sadness she remembered Lady Tsuguko. It was she who had explained to Sachi and Taki how the southern lords –
those who were furthest from Edo and from the control of the shogun – had put about the theory that the emperor, aeons earlier, had given the shogun authority to rule, and that that authority should now be returned to the emperor. Not that they intended the emperor truly to rule: far from it, they were determined to use the emperor’s name to take power themselves.

Daisuké must think they were foolish gullible women to tell them such stories, Sachi thought. Didn’t he realize that the women of the shogun’s household knew as much about affairs of state as any man? And surely it must be obvious where their loyalties lay.

‘Give power back to the emperor?’ demanded Taki, bristling. ‘You mean take power into your own hands. Those friends of yours, those southerners – they killed His Grace the old emperor. They murdered him. His present Grace is a child. You’d kill him too if he didn’t do what you wanted.
You
brought war on this country.’

She glared at him accusingly. ‘You were in Kyoto,’ she snapped. ‘You! You were fighting there.’

Daisuké looked away. ‘There was fighting there,’ he muttered. ‘And I was involved in it. We’re making a new world.’

In the distance there were footsteps – the soldiers returning. Daisuké looked relieved. He shifted back a little, adjusted his posture, put on an official face.

‘What will become of us?’ Sachi asked urgently. ‘Can’t you help us?’

‘I don’t have that power,’ he said. ‘But I’ll seek you out, wherever you are, and do my best for you. I’ll watch over you, no matter what. I haven’t found you just to lose you again.’

III

The door of Sachi’s palanquin was open but she didn’t get in. She was trying to imprint the image of the palace and the gardens on her mind. She knew with terrible certainty that once the door closed she would never see any of it again.

In the spring sunshine the palace looked lonelier than ever. Moss sprouted between the roof tiles. The buildings were
beginning to crumble. Ferns and horsetail shoots burst out between the moss-covered boulders of the ramparts. The gardeners had long since fled. Wild grasses, tall and pale, swayed in the wind. Reeds darkened the grey and silver waters of the lake and ivy clung to the tree trunks and hung in festoons from the branches. The air was full of the warm scent of moist earth, leaves and grass.

For a moment Sachi thought she glimpsed a fox, poking its head out of the bushes and peeking around. Then it disappeared. Perhaps it was a fox spirit, the ghost of one of the myriad women who had died there.

She took a last look then stepped into the palanquin. As the little box rose gently into the air, she could hear the shouts of the bearers and the crunch of their straw sandals.

Five days had passed since the arrival of the envoys. Sachi’s fate had been decreed. Together with the princess, the Old Crow and their entourages, she was to move to the mansion of the Shimizu family and stay there in seclusion. None of them had the slightest idea what would become of them.

She had not managed to get a message to Shinzaemon. It would have been better to have died, Sachi told herself. That way she could at least have met him in the next world, as she had promised.

It grew dark inside the palanquin. They were passing into the shadows of a gate, on their way out of the castle. The bearers’ footsteps echoed with a hollow sound. She heard guards shouting. The footsteps rang out with a different tone as they ran across the moat. Again they passed into shadow.

Then doors clanged shut. She heard grinding and crashing followed by a thud as a mighty wooden bolt slammed into place. She had left the women’s palace for the last time.

IV

Spring ended and with it the nightingale’s song. The little bird huddled in its cage, a forlorn ball of brown feathers. Every day Sachi sat by it as the servants gave it its food. She was sure its eyes were growing dimmer and its plumage dull. Sometimes she hoped
she might share its fate. She hadn’t even bothered to order the attendants to unpack. She told herself she wanted to be ready to leave at any moment, but in truth she felt so sad and lethargic she couldn’t summon up the energy.

She thought about the village, about Otama and Jiroemon, the kind and loving parents who had brought her up, and about these other ‘real’ parents who had suddenly appeared: the mother who was perhaps no more than a ghost and the all-too-real father. If anyone could save them, her father could.

And silently, secretly, she yearned for Shinzaemon. At first she was ashamed that such unruly feelings burned inside her. She knew that a woman was a creature of no account who was duty bound to obey her father until she was given away in marriage, then her husband until he died, and after that her son. That was the natural order of things. But her husband and liege lord – His Majesty the shogun – was dead and she had no son. In such a case in normal times a woman would return to her family, to her parents. But these were not normal times. There was nothing for it but to take her life in her own hands and follow her feelings, wherever they led. That was what her mother had done. But for the time being it made no difference what she felt or what she thought. It was all no more than idle daydreams as long as she remained immured in the Shimizu mansion.

So the days passed, merging seamlessly one into the next. The princess had shut herself in her room. She had set His Majesty’s funerary tablet and the daguerreotype image of him, looking so boyish and vulnerable, on the altar. Hour after hour she knelt, telling her beads, murmuring prayers and sitting silently in meditation. When he had died she had taken holy vows; now it seemed she had decided to lead the life of a nun in earnest.

The rains came, thundering on the roof tiles like an army of horses. Water cascaded in sheets from the eaves and the gardens turned into a lake. The heat was unbearable. Sachi’s thin summer robes stuck to her like the bandages of a corpse. Mould glistened in every corner, encrusting the wooden drawers, the chests and the wooden sandals on the step outside the veranda. In the evenings bullfrogs brayed raucously in the ponds and owls hooted in the trees. Insects dashed against the paper screens. Taki’s fan
was perpetually flapping, beating off the flies that settled on everything and everyone. Mosquitoes filled the airless nights with incessant buzzing.

Taki had grown even thinner and paler. She too seemed sad and listless. She never spoke of Toranosuké but Sachi could see that her journey into the world outside the palace had changed her. Like Sachi, she could no longer be contented with a life of seclusion, no matter how pampered.

Eventually Sachi couldn’t bear it any more. She shoved back the heavy wooden shutters and stepped outside. Splashing through the puddles, she was oblivious to the water soaking her legs and the mud clinging to her sandals and squelching between her toes. As the hot dank air filled her lungs she felt herself coming back to life. Taki scurried beside her, holding an umbrella over her head.

At the edge of the grounds they found a wall with steps leading up it. Sachi scrambled to the top with Taki on her heels and emerged, laughing and panting, soaked with sweat and rain, on to a parapet.

The city spread before them, a sea of glistening roofs stretching as far as they could see, dotted with trees and splashes of green. A haze of steam shimmered above the hot wet tiles. Below them the wall plummeted towards the dark waters of the moat. A little way away was a gate, leading to a bridge. From their perch on the parapet they could see the sweeping roofs and tiled walls of daimyos’ estates and an expanse of grassland dotted with pines and cedars. A teahouse peeked from the trees.

‘Goji-in Field,’ said Taki, raising her voice above the clatter of rain on the umbrella. ‘His Majesty’s hunting ground where he used to exercise his falcons.’

Nearby were rows of barracks shaded by cypresses and cedars. But the place looked empty. The buildings were beginning to fall down and packs of dogs slunk about the grounds.

A river glinted in the distance. Beyond it the roofs became a jumble, small as the squares on a go board and tightly packed, squashed together higgledy-piggledy until they faded across the horizon. Threads of smoke wavered skywards, merging into the clouds. There were glimpses of movement, the hum and thrum of life.

‘The townsfolk’s section of the city,’ said Sachi. ‘At least it’s alive over there.’

‘I suppose they have nowhere else to go,’ said Taki. ‘Everyone who can has already left Edo.’

They stood and watched while the watery sun climbed in the sky. They were looking towards the north-east section of the city – in the unlucky direction of the ‘demon gate’ where evil spirits came from and where the execution grounds were. A couple of hills rose from the muddle of roofs. On one they could clearly see red buildings with gleaming black roofs dotted across the hillside.

‘Isn’t that . . . Kanei-ji?’ whispered Sachi. Kanei-ji Temple, the chief temple of the city, one of the greatest in all the land, built to protect the populace from the evil spirits of the north-east. It was the temple of the Tokugawa clan. In quieter times she had gone there to pray at the tombs of His Majesty’s ancestors. She remembered it still – the great red-painted halls, covering the entire hilltop, breathtakingly magnificent. Kanei-ji, on Ueno Hill, where the retired shogun, Lord Yoshinobu, had taken sanctuary: where the militia was billeted, where the resistance had their headquarters. Shinzaemon was there, somewhere on that hill. She put her hand on her obi. She could feel the small round toggle in the shape of a monkey tucked firmly inside.

Every day after that Sachi went out and stood gazing at the city. In her imagination she crossed the bridge, skirted Goji-in Field, hurried along the broad empty boulevards that cut through the daimyos’ section of town, crossed the river and entered the cramped maze of streets where the townsfolk lived until finally she came to Ueno Hill. She could see the great roofs and red walls of buildings covering the entire hill, surrounding courtyards crowded with people and edged with groves of trees. If she looked hard she could make out individual figures milling around the grounds. Sometimes she heard the crack of rifles and distant shouts and yells.

She yearned to be there with them. The princess’s few remaining attendants and ladies-in-waiting, the Old Crow’s much-depleted retinue and the ladies and maids of the Shimizu family were all used to living their lives indoors; inside the women’s palace or inside the Shimizu mansion, it didn’t make
much difference. That was what they expected of life. Sachi and Taki seemed the only ones who were not prepared to endure whatever fate thrust in their way.

V

Early one morning Sachi was sitting with the women who had moved with her to the Shimizu mansion. Some of them were sewing, some completing their toilette. Sachi was trying to read, waiting for the moment when everyone would be absorbed in their tasks and she could slip away to her favourite place on the parapet.

Suddenly there was a boom like thunder breaking right overhead. Everyone flinched.

Then came another, then another – massive explosions that shook the walls and rattled the paper screens in their frames. The air quivered with the noise. The women looked at each other, all with the same expression of calm, luminous exhilaration, almost relief. They were warrior women, all of them; they knew what the booms were and what they meant. Cannon fire. The city was at war. The tedious waiting was over.

It was the fifteenth day of the fifth month. They had been in seclusion for more than two months.

Sachi leaped to her feet and darted outside. Rain was coming down in sheets. Taki raced after her, struggling to keep the umbrella over her head. They splashed across the grounds to the wall and scrambled up blindly, feeling their way in the murky light. Sachi’s small hands were covered in mud and her sodden kimono skirts clung to her ankles.

Low cloud hung over the city. Through the mist and driving rain Sachi could see flashes lighting up the hills. Plumes of smoke, whiter than the clouds, rolled above the trees. The booms and bangs and thuds were deafening.

‘What’s going on, Taki?’ she demanded.

There were other people on the parapet peering anxiously into the rain, their faces ghastly. Some were women she recognized, others men. They looked like servants and retainers who had moved there from the palace or worked for the Shimizu family.

They bowed when they saw Sachi. Among them was the wizened old man who had let them into the palace grounds, a lifetime ago. He started to get down on his hands and knees in the mud. Sachi gestured impatiently.

‘Old man, what’s happening?’

‘There’s a lot of our fellows over there, my lady,’ he said. ‘Wish I was too. But I’m too old. I’d be no use to them.’

‘Our men?’

‘Palace guards. They made off before the castle was taken over. A lot went to bolster the militia. The rest went north to join the army up there.’

‘So it’s the militia over there on the hill,’ Sachi said, trying to stop the quiver of excitement and fear in her voice.

‘We’re doing well,’ said the old man. ‘Them southerners talk big but they got their backs against the wall. Our men have had command of the city. Helps that the townsfolk are on our side. We been out there skirmishing, ambushing their patrols, cutting down southerners every day. We even launched a full-out assault on their barracks. It’s a regular uprising. Anyway, seems the southerners’ve had enough. There’s been a lot of talk these last few days that they are going to send in an army, wipe out the militia once and for all. There’s been leaflets all over the city telling us townsfolk to keep away.’

He took a tattered piece of paper out of his sleeve. Raindrops pounded it, blurring the ink. Sachi stared at it, trying to concentrate, but her heart was beating so hard she could barely make sense of the words: ‘. . . assassinating the soldiers of the government . . . rebels against the state . . . It has been found unavoidable to use force against them.’