The Company of the Dead

by David Kowalski

  Morishita, his household administrator, sat directly across from him, freshly tonsured. The thinning remains of his grey hair were tied back in a topknot. That morning Sada-Omi had found the old man’s new appearance amusing, the two swords rattling clumsily against his bony waist as he made his way down the aisle of the gondola to present himself to his master. Sada-Omi had managed to restrict his mirth to a thin smile as he had accepted the old man’s thanks for this honourable appointment. The promotion to samurai must have come from the Emperor. Sada-Omi would need to have a samurai present in order to fulfil the mission.

  Beside Morishita sat Norimitsu, Colonel of the Kempei-Tai, the Special Police. He was looking past the Prince, his stare lost somewhere beyond the confines of the Kamikaze and her cabins. The only other occupants of the gondola were two swordsmen of the Imperial Watch, who stood by the entrance to the pilot’s cabin, and the German minister for defence.

  The minister’s mottled face tilted to one side and blankly returned Sada-Omi’s stare. As the Kamikaze slowly gained altitude, passing through gentle buffets of thermal currents, the minister’s head lolled back and forth, accompanied by the clink of the poisoned cha glass that sat on its saucer. A trail of spittle had worked its way down from the corner of his mouth to the high lapels of his crumpled dress uniform.

  Sada-Omi addressed him in a whisper. “Where you go, I shall follow.”

  “My Lord?” Morishita enquired, eyes still downcast.

  “I find the minister for defence an attentive audience.”

  The colonel snorted gruffly. “Finally, he accords you honour.”

  “The first of many,” the Prince replied softly.

  He returned to the letter. His father’s calligraphy stark and heavy on the rice paper that was so light in his hands.

  On the tenth day of the tenth month in the twentieth year of Kanei, Master Shinmen Musashi took up his brush and began a work that you will complete. I speak of the Go Rin No Sho, the Book of Five Rings. I read to you from this book as you lay at your mother’s breast, as I did to your brother, the Crown Prince, before you. I never understood the true meaning of Musashi’s words, even though the priests now assure me that I must have had some glimpse of them when I named you Sada-Omi, Noble Destiny.

  The Book is of five parts: Ground, Water, Fire, Wind and, finally, Void. It was written as the total distillation of Master Musashi’s thoughts on strategy in war. Often it has steered my course. Time and again it has lit a pathway for me through trails of bewilderment and indecision. And now, in this dark time, it brings me some small comfort.

  That which I ask you to do, as a Knight of Bushido, and a Prince of the Empire, I do not request. I would not insult you by suggesting that you have a choice in this matter. For I offer you the greatest of gifts. Immortality.

  I sent you into the camp of our enemies as an envoy of Peace. In order to make our deception complete I had to deceive you, and for this I am sorry. It was my belief that were you to approach the Kaiser and his men with the full knowledge of Victory, you would have been unable, in your youth, to conceal your pride.

  There can be no peace with the Germans, no truce with barbarians.

  They looked at our history and attributed our victories to the weakness of our foes. They believed that any success we had was by the grace of our fortune. And now they are wondering, what has happened? These funny yellow people who love to bow and live in houses of paper and wood, how have they become so powerful? So ignorance breeds fear.

  They talk of Peace and they summon us to their parleys while their warships plough our waters and their soldiers march towards our borders. They desire war and they desire it on their own terms.

  Let me tell you about war, my son, for though you are to be my instrument and weapon, you have always been the poet rather than the warrior. War is the resolution of confusion and the definition of power. When there is peace it is because nations perceive the strengths of their neighbours. They know when to take what they want and they know when to back down. It is the same when two men encounter each other walking down a street, the weak bowing before the strong.

  You have heard the phrase “fog of war”, describing the smoke that comes from gunpowder and cannon and obstructs a view of battle. To me, no phrase is more apt. War is two men approaching each other on a narrow mountain path, lost in the mist. To each, the other is obscured. To each, the other looms in shadow. At times they appear larger, then smaller, as the fog swirls in and out. Footsteps ring heavily on stone, then soft on patches of soil and grass. Each must ask himself, do I continue or stand aside? An inner conflict is waged. In some form or another it must be manifested.

  So it is with nations.

  The Germans ask us to back down because they cannot conceive of us carrying the fight to them. They cannot perceive our strengths and believe that we will quietly return to our “villages” like good little natives. If they knew our strengths, then as brothers we could rule. But how to prove it to them, my son? Only through war. To prove ourselves their equal, we must become their masters.

  So why have I sent you?

  Though you go resolutely, you do not have to go in ignorance. There will be time enough later for you to understand all, as you sit alongside the throne of Jimmu, our first Emperor, and look down at our victories. But for now, know this. You are my son.

  The Germans believe that I value you and your brother beyond all things. They are correct, for it is the greatest gift I bestow on you. You will be permitted where others are banned. You will be courted where others would be despised. For though you are an enemy, you are the son of an Emperor.

  I sent you with few men, for I wished your humility to make the Germans haughty. You may go unmolested where others will be carefully searched. You carry with you a vast weapon that is beyond our enemy’s conception, and you bring it to their very doorstep.

  I have heard of military operations that were clumsy but swift. I have never seen one that was skilful and protracted. A prolonged military action against so strong an enemy can never be beneficial. You shall be as swift as the thunder that peals before you have an opportunity to cover your ears, as fast as the lightning that flashes before you can blink your eyes. You are the final chapter of Musashi’s book. You will level the earth and dry the waters. Flames will ride before you and a great blast of wind shall flatten all who remain.

  Sada-Omi, you are the bringer of the void to our enemy.

  Now that you know what exists, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void. In the void there is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence. Spirit is nothingness.

  Sada-Omi placed the letter on his lap.

  “Is it time?”

  “Soon, my Prince,” the colonel replied. “Your father has planned this to the exact moment.”

  The Prince turned to look at Morishita, the man who had borne him on his back when he was a child, who had taken him to classes, who had served him and his family faithfully since his grandfather had ruled.

  “You are to be my kaishaku, my second.”

  Morishita nodded solemnly.

  The Prince repositioned himself for comfort on the thin cloth, closed his eyes and waited. In no time at all an eternity elapsed. It was all so clear to him.

  Earth, water, fire, wind.

  Void.

  “My Lord, it is time.”

  Sada-Omi opened his eyes.

  Morishita nodded almost imperceptibly in the direction of the German minister’s corpse. “Shall I have him removed?”

  “That won’t be necessary.” The Prince glanced out of the gondola window. A sliver of moon hung in the distance on a sea of cloud.

  “My Prince,” the colonel said, “the Germans have been trying to contact us. They want to know why we have ascended. They suggest that we moor the dirigible as a storm is approaching.”

  “They are correct. What is the time, Colonel?”

  “It is nine o’clock
.”

  Sada-Omi turned towards the small altar near the front of the gondola and bowed. Morishita slowly rose to his feet and shuffled towards the Prince. He held a briefcase before him and placed it gently in the Prince’s lap. A braid of wiring trailed behind it. The Prince took it up in both hands, raised it to his forehead, then laid it down again upon his knees.

  Morishita picked up the dagger from the edge of the red cloth and walked around the small dais to stand behind the Prince’s left shoulder. He held the blade close to the Prince’s throat.

  “What is the time at home, Colonel?” the Prince asked in a soft yet distinct voice.

  “It would be five o’clock in the morning, Highness.”

  Sada-Omi grasped the briefcase clasps and opened the lid. The top of the case was lined with black velvet. At the bottom was a small silver console embedded in similar material. The console was bare, with the exception of two small switches. The Prince flicked the left switch forwards. The console emitted a small high-pitched note.

  “Sonno joi,” the colonel said. Revere the Emperor, expel the Barbarians.

  The Prince placed his right hand on the second switch. He looked up at the colonel.

  “Once,” he said, “I went with my father and brother to stay with our cousins in Kyoto. On the last morning of our visit I was awakened by a soft knock at my door. It was Keiko, my oldest cousin. She would have been nineteen at the time. I was sixteen.”

  Sada-Omi could feel Morishita’s breath against his neck. The colonel was gazing at him thoughtfully.

  “She led me out of the house and down through the palace gardens to the temple. Are you familiar with the temple in Kyoto?”

  “I am,” the colonel replied with a little smile.

  “She took me to the edge of the lake that lies before the temple’s entrance, bade me to sit down on the shore, and, without a word, she dived into the water. She emerged a few moments later and stood upon a small rock a short way out into the lake. The sun was just rising and the water was the lightest shade of blue.”

  Sada-Omi shook his head slowly, the fingers of his right hand stroking the soft felt around the second switch.

  “I looked at her and at her perfect reflection as she stood upon this little rock, and I willed my own likeness, my mirror image, to go out and embrace hers. Recalling that moment, I think the time must have been about five o’clock.”

  He flicked the second switch.

  II

  April 22, 2012

  Outskirts of Stettin, Greater Germany

  The royal train had left the Bismarckplatz at eight o’clock, bound for Danzig. Kaiser Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig III sat in the rear-most carriage.

  He had yet to offer his apologies to Prince Sada-Omi for his absence from the upcoming peace talks. That could wait till morning. He faced the rear of the carriage. By day he enjoyed viewing the countryside, a thin plume of grey smoke marking the train’s serpentine trail. By night he took pleasure in watching the city lights recede in a tide of luminescent hillsides and valleys.

  The Empress had contacted him two hours earlier to inform him that his youngest son had taken ill. She’d implored him to leave the capital as the royal physician was concerned about the boy’s health. He had then spoken to the doctor himself, who had earnestly reassured him that the boy would be well. The truth be told, he was more concerned about his wife’s well-being.

  These Romanovs have been nothing but trouble for my family, he mused, sighing. My wife may well be Empress of Prussia but she’ll always be the Tsar’s daughter.

  He reached out a hand and grasped the gold-braided rope by his side, giving it a gentle tug.

  He pondered the events that had led him to this moment. His marriage had been one of convenience, orchestrated by his grandfather whilst he had been studying at Oxford. The royal wedding had been the culmination of an arrangement forged thirty years before his birth to cement the ties between the royal families of Germany and Russia.

  Following the Great War and the subsequent revolution in Russia, Tsar Nicholas II had petitioned all the royal families of Europe for sanctuary. The Windsors had refused. They had enough troubles in the wake of England’s defeat without having to care for a royal family that had more legal claim to their throne than they did. In Spain and Austro-Hungary, the Romanovs were again turned away. Finally, the Tsar had been forced to request a meeting with his enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia. The armies of White Russia, by this time exhausted, were on the verge of defeat at the hands of the Bolsheviks. It was exile or death for Tsar Nicholas and his family.

  Wilhelm accepted the Romanovs’ plea with a single stipulation. He offered the deposed Tsar a palace in Königsberg by the sea. He accorded Nicholas every honour in exchange for one promise: should the Romanov family ever be reinstated to the Russian throne, the Tsar’s first-born daughter would be betrothed to the German Prince-Regent. The crown of Russia would then pass to their descendants, linking both nations under one rule. German rule. The empire, thus formed, would extend from the Rhine to the steppes of Asia.

  Less than a generation passed before this gentlemen’s agreement became a possibility. In February of 1941, following a brief skirmish with the Japanese over Eastern interests, Stalin had turned his attention to the West. The USSR invaded Lithuania, Estonia and Carpathia. The recently formed Duchy of Poland turned to the Germans for assistance, fearful that the Soviets would refuse to halt at their borders. The English, beholden to Germany for its aid during the Irish revolt of 1925, and fearing communist expansion, offered naval support. Then, in a surprising turn of events, the Axis Powers, comprised of the fascist governments in France, Italy and Spain, declared an alliance with the Russians.

  Though France and Russia had been allies in the Great War, their unconditional defeat and respective revolutions had led to the formation of regimes that lay at opposite sides of the political spectrum. Yet they shared a common goal: the destruction of the German Empire. Less than twenty-five years after the War to End All Wars, the major nations of Europe were once again embroiled in conflict. The European War had begun.

  There was a knock at the carriage door. Wilhelm III glanced up at the rear-carriage window.

  “Come.”

  A servant in a white dress coat entered the cabin. He glided with a steady grace, unmindful of the train’s undulation, and placed a metal tray on the Kaiser’s lap. He bowed slightly and backed out of the carriage.

  Wilhelm III returned to his musings. The European War. A brief but bloody conflict that ended with German victory and the restoration of monarchies to all the nations of Europe. A continent of kings, but with only one Emperor. Wilhelm II, his grandfather.

  He sipped slowly at his brandy.

  I love my wife, he thought. A happy accident, all things considered, but she has only brought me liability. The Russian Empire is a toothless lion that I am now obliged to defend. They chose to provoke a century-old argument with the Japanese, and look what it has brought them.

  The Japanese now hold a line from Tiksi to Vladivostok. They obviously have had a hand in the uprising in Kazakhstan and there have been rumours of Japanese troops sighted as far west as Omsk. What do they hope to achieve?

  It happened with great swiftness.

  Wilhelm felt the train lurch forwards.

  A wave of pure force swept through the carriage. It crushed him into his chair, forcing it back on straining hinges. Caught in that moment between reflex and reason, he watched as the stained glass windows shattered in rapid sequence. The spinning brandy glass, caught mid-turn, exploded in a shower of glittering motes. And then the wind came.

  III

  The fires still raged over the horizon yet it was deathly cold. Wilhelm sat in the front seat of a wagon beside an elderly man wearing a worn greatcoat. Behind him, a few of the blast’s survivors huddled on the wagon’s sawdust-strewn tray. Looking about, he made out various cloaked figures on horseback.

  A thin fog had risen, skirting the trees. />
  His entourage was made up of cavalry officers and cooks, statesmen and servants. After the blast had struck, the train had careened wildly of its tracks. The locomotive and its first four carriages slammed into the side of a station house, bursting into flames. Caught in the winds that accompanied the explosion, they were engulfed by an inferno.

  The last three carriages had remained on the rails. Wilhelm, crouched behind his upturned seat, watched in wonder as his carriage traversed the wall of fire to emerge, unscathed, on the other side of the small building.

  In moments he’d been dragged from the carriage and into the open air. Slowly he realised what had occurred, even though it was beyond any measure of comprehension.

  Berlin was gone. Where the city had once stood, a vast rolling cloud was settling. It pulsed and glowed with unearthly light beneath an expanding mushroom of heated air and flame.

  Most of his honour guard lay crushed or burnt inside the wreck. The remainder formed around him, phantoms in their dark cloaks and mud-specked helmets. Behind them, a ragged squad of the other survivors stood in disarray. There were no radios. The torches did not work.

  Nothing worked.

  His men stood, shoulders slack, faces pale and slick with perspiration. And then the words had issued from his mouth. “Stand firm. We will mourn our city once we have avenged her.”

  Those who could walk followed their Kaiser along the railway track. Somehow he’d led his men to a derelict farmhouse and enlisted the aid of this elderly man. Sitting now in the wagon, he could not recall a further word he’d said.

  There was much to do.

  Once he reached a functioning radio, he would need to set up headquarters and assess the extent of the damage to his empire. How high was the detonation? What was the range of the pulse?

  Even in the unlikely event that this horror was the action of a third party, there was no doubting that the Japanese would capitalise on the situation. They already had large numbers of men committed in East Russia, but there were numerous potential fronts for armed conflict. From the westernmost provinces of Occupied China, they could enter and support the communist rebels in Kazakhstan. They could also, just as easily, swing southwest into India and Pakistan, threatening German interests there as well. And they could always rely on the Mexicans to make trouble in Confederate America should they consider taking on the Southern states.