by Rokuro Inui
He looked down at his hands as they walked. The fingers that should have been missing were all present, good as new.
Long hours of practice had been required before he could walk properly again, but now he could run and jump like anyone else.
“Maybe with these repairs I’ll finally understand you,” Jinnai said. “I hope so.”
“You will never understand me,” Eve said with a smile. “Even among humans, the thoughts of another are never truly knowable, are they?”
He had to admit she was right. Humans and automata had that in common.
They crossed the bridge, walked past the stalls and under Bonten Gate, and arrived at the plaza.
The karakuri floats of last time were nowhere to be seen. Now the space was filled with a single gigantic big top.
Four great round posts served as tent poles, and the heavy canvas was pulled taut by ropes in eight directions and held in place by stakes driven into the ground.
A crowd had gathered around the tent flap, and the food vendors were doing a brisk trade. The signs outside the big top depicted gruesome man-beast hybrids, frolicking contortionists, and—proudly displayed in prime position—a young girl doing midair tricks on a wire.
They entered the crowded tent and found Kasuga in the middle of her performance.
Dressed in something filmy that glittered like a celestial maiden’s cloak of feathers, she bounded adroitly above a net stretched between the tentpoles. Her weighted wire shot out and sent the flames shooting forth from a row of ten candles to deafening applause. Certainly a better use of her talents than killing.
What caught Jinnai’s attention was Kasuga’s partner, who was beating a drum in time with the aerial display. Or trying to. Her rhythm was erratic, and he doubted it had any effect other than to distract Kasuga and irritate the crowds. In fact, looking closely Jinnai thought he saw Kasuga trying to adjust her own movements to match the irregular drumbeat.
“Should we stay and speak to them after the show?” asked Eve.
Jinnai thought for a moment. “Let’s not,” he said.
They exited the tent again, leaving Kasuga in midair and the empress drumming.
On the evening of the following day, when Jinnai accompanied Eve to the temple again for her daily prayers, the troupe had already moved on, leaving nothing in the plaza but an icy winter wind.
I
“Interesting.”
Kihachi Umekawa, master of the Garden of August Repose, was face-to-face with the iron cabinet hidden in the depths of the imperial tomb.
The tomb was a burial mound in the ancient style, located at the center of the pentagonal courtyard that was the heart of the imperial palace. It was topped with a cover of gleaming black iron like an enormous turtle, and the cover was crisscrossed with more recently installed iron scaffolding.
Kihachi gathered that the tomb had been strictly off-limits long before the palace had been rebuilt over it, but the precautions that had been taken to secure it were unusually extreme.
How the cover had been installed, nobody knew. Kihachi’s men had needed over a hundred days to pierce it. It concealed a large stone cavern that smelled of mold, and in the cavern was the iron cabinet.
Ten workmen were in the cavern with him, and preparations to extract the cabinet were underway.
Kihachi held his gando lantern high, illuminating the cabinet. It was perhaps six feet square at the base and at least nine feet high. The lower part was carved with some kind of diagram that covered every square inch of the surface.
According to Lord Fujibayashi, governor of Saumi, who headed the refinery and had inspected the cabinet first, it was unclear how these designs had been executed or how the cabinet itself had been sealed.
Kihachi looked up. Above him he saw the hole punched in the tomb’s cover. Through the hole the scaffolding was visible, and beyond that a cloudless blue sky.
Satisfied that the preparations had been made as planned, Kihachi climbed a ladder out of the tomb.
In the courtyard, Kihachi’s gardeners—in other words, the shogun’s spies—mingled with laborers from the refinery as they bustled around various workstations. The project was top secret, and most of the necessary muscle had been brought in from Tempu.
Mounts of leftover soil and work tools lay scattered around, and several lean-tos had been thrown together to provide shade. The elegance and languor one might expect at the imperial palace was entirely absent. It looked like a construction site.
The shogun’s men had been solicitous of the palace’s inhabitants at first, but now they tramped through the place like they owned it. Kihachi gathered that there had been irritating conventions to observe in the past, but the stricter the rule, the faster it crumbled once broken. It was only a matter of time before they had free rein even of the inner rooms, theoretically restricted to those of noble birth, and even the inner sanctum where the empress dwelled.
At Kihachi’s signal, his gardeners scrambled up the scaffolding and attached a dozen hefty pulleys to the scaffolding around the opening. The pulleys, so enormous that each man could only carry one, were wound with the special kind of rope made of human hair that temples used to hang their bells. When each rope was securely wrapped around its pulley, its free end was tossed down through the hole in the imperial tomb’s ceiling to be tied around the cabinet.
Kihachi watched the network of ropes take form, like an enormous spiderweb spun over the tomb. Finally, a man approached to tell him that everything was in place.
“Begin,” Kihachi told him.
“Third time’s the charm, eh, Kihachi?” said Fujibayashi, sitting on a portable bench in the shade of a large parasol.
“I hope so, milord.”
This would be their third attempt to hoist the cabinet from its chamber of stone. The first had failed when the cabinet proved too heavy to lift. The second time around, they had raised it six or seven feet off the ground before the rope snapped and the men underneath were crushed. If the web of ropes and pulleys failed, they would have to take a different approach altogether. As the man charged with getting the cabinet out, Kihachi’s professional reputation was at stake.
The ends of the ropes that came down the sides of the tomb had been gathered into four bundles. At Kihachi’s signal, the men in the courtyard divided into four groups. Each took up one of the bundles and began to pull, slowly backing away from the imperial tomb.
At first the glossy black rope only stretched, with the cabinet obstinately immobile.
Kihachi made a noise of disgust. Another failure.
But then, slowly, the cabinet began to rise.
By now the ropes were stretched to half their original thickness. Their elasticity made them stronger.
The tip of the cabinet’s hip-and-gable roof showed through the hole in the iron dome. Men up on the scaffolding stopped the cabinet from swaying and guided it up through the hole, which was just barely large enough for it.
Kihachi swallowed. This was where the rope had snapped last time.
But this time they had more pulleys and better rope, and soon the entire cabinet was clear. They waited for the men still in the tomb to emerge, then laid thick square logs across the hole in the dome, covering it completely.
The plan was to lower the cabinet onto the logs, untie the ropes, and then build a ramp of rock and earth to carefully slide the cabinet down to ground level. The work of opening it would begin after that.
But.
Even though they had chosen oak and cherry and other hard timbers, as soon as the cabinet came to rest on the logs, they started to creak and break.
“Hold firm!” Kihachi yelled at the men still holding the ropes. But when they hurriedly pulled the ropes taut again, the cabinet was yanked off-balance.
Before Kihachi could react, it had toppled onto its side and begun sliding down the bl
ack dome with increasing speed.
The pulleys were torn free of their moorings and flew into the air. Some of the men holding the ropes went with them.
Kihachi grabbed Fujibayashi by the collar and dragged him back, away from the tomb.
An instant later, the tumbling iron cabinet slammed into the ground right where they had just been, skidding to a stop in a spray of earth and dust.
Kihachi glanced over at Fujibayashi. He was white as a sheet but unharmed.
The courtyard was in an uproar. The men yanked into the air by the ropes they’d been holding had landed on their heads and now twitched horribly on the ground. Others groaned and bled where they lay, having failed to get out of the cabinet’s path in time.
Ignoring them all, Kihachi hurried to the cabinet.
Part of its roof was cracked.
Kihachi smiled internally.
If all had gone as planned today, building the ramp to get the cabinet down would have taken weeks, and who knew how much longer would have been needed to get the thing open. This accident had accomplished both tasks in seconds. If the price for that was a few gardeners and refinery laborers, so be it.
Suddenly, a small moving object sprang out of the crack in the roof. Without thinking, Kihachi caught it in his hands.
He felt something jumping between his cupped palms. Waiting until it calmed down somewhat, he opened his hands a crack to peer inside.
He was holding a single cricket, its antennae trembling.
A good omen. He transferred the insect to a bamboo tube he produced from the front fold of his work clothes. He carried the tubes with him everywhere at this time of year, along with insect cages, in case he spotted a cricket while working in the castle gardens. With the excavations at the palace, he had resigned himself to not finding an entrant for the tournament this year.
The palace grounds were the original home of cricket fighting, before it had spread to the common folk. A cricket caught here would have to be a good one.
The question of how an insect could emerge alive from a sealed cabinet in a tomb left undisturbed for decades did nag at him, but he supposed the creature must have found its way into the cavern and hidden in the carvings on the cabinet’s panels.
Tucking the bamboo tube back into his work clothes, Kihachi began barking orders across the still-chaotic courtyard.
II
“I wonder if Kyuzo will ever build Tentoku a new body.”
Jinnai turned to look at Eve, sitting beside him on the rear veranda of the Kugimiya residence. He saw the gleam of tears beneath her long lashes.
It had been more than ten years since he had first spoken to her at Nakasu Kannon, but she was as young and beautiful as ever.
“One thing I’ve learned from my time here is how deep the art of automata is,” he said. “A wrestler’s body can’t be an easy thing to make, although admittedly I didn’t know the man in life.”
“In life!” Eve looked at him sharply. “You speak as though he were dead.”
Jinnai shook his head hurriedly. “A slip of the tongue,” he said. “Forgive me.”
“Will you ask Kyuzo about Tentoku for me, when he returns?”
“All right, all right.”
With a sigh, Eve got to her feet and withdrew into the house. He must have upset her.
Thinking of Tentoku’s life captured and preserved inside a wooden box, Jinnai surveyed the yard. It was as unbeautiful as ever: an expanse of hardened earth without a single tree or even a decorative rock.
Ten years. It felt like a single moment.
On the surface, the world appeared more peaceful now. Not long after the dissolution of the Conch and Taiko, Kyuzo had been relieved of his post at the refinery. Nevertheless, he had retained his residence on the outskirts of Tempu, and Jinnai, with nowhere else to go after losing his own job with the shogun’s intelligence service, had moved in as a live-in apprentice, learning the art of automata. Before long Kyuzo was running something of a private school.
He did not have many students, but he admitted not only those with some experience in mechanics but also the children of daimyo and hatamoto from distant domains (if they showed potential), samurai stationed in Tempu, and even ronin.
The Kugimiya residence was much busier these days as a result, but as far as Jinnai knew, none of the students had even guessed that the diligent Eve was in fact the pinnacle of the art they studied.
Jinnai rose to his feet and followed the stepping-stones across the yard to the workshop. He was the only student permitted inside, but this was simply because he already knew so much that there was no reason to hide anything from him.
Jinnai passed through the workshop’s two doors, removed his sandals, and stepped up onto the wooden floor. The basement of the storehouse room was where Kyuzo performed maintenance on Eve’s person and other tasks he did not wish anyone to see, but this was not Jinnai’s destination today. He walked past the eternal clock in the middle of the main room and entered a smaller room at the back of the building.
The rear room contained a workbench, much smaller than Kyuzo’s, on which lay the golden macaw, opened to the throat.
Jinnai sat down beside it, fixed the scope to one eye, and got to work.
The bird was an automaton that Kyuzo had made as an experiment when he had been a student at Keian Higa’s Institute of Machinery. Its skin was adorned with real, colorful feathers, but its innards were not flesh and bone but springs, clockwork, and gears arranged within a dully gleaming skeleton carved of metal.
The balance wheel where its heart should be was currently still.
When Jinnai learned that Kyuzo had made the macaw simply by copying existing designs, Jinnai had been too stunned to speak.
Beside the workbench stood a lacquered box with mother-of-pearl inlay and a tree branch sticking out of it. This was the true “body” of the automaton; it contained the workings that set the bird in motion and gave it the appearance of life.
Kyuzo had not been skillful enough at the time to fit everything inside the macaw itself. He had begun as a craftsman for the karakuri floats at Nakasu Kannon, and the macaw represented the last remnants of those techniques.
Today, Kyuzo dismissed the bird as a toy, but the more Jinnai examined it, the greater the gulf between the two of them felt. Certainly he doubted whether he could re-create the bird himself.
But this was all part of his training. Kyuzo had ordered him to determine what was wrong with the macaw and fix it by himself. He would not even tell Jinnai what had caused the bird to begin malfunctioning several days before. He had never been a very hands-on teacher.
Jinnai was not quite ready to begin disassembling the bird, fearing that if he took it apart at his current level, he would never get it back together again. He continued his inspection, rotating the dial on his monocular scope to bring the lens into focus on each new component.
Soon he felt himself beginning to perspire. The work took staggering amounts of concentration, and if he failed to take plenty of breaks, it soon gave him a headache severe enough to take him out of commission for an hour. Ten years into his studies, he had yet to get used to this.
If Kyuzo was left to his own devices, he could work for two days, even three, without sleeping, eating, or even drinking.
Jinnai gave up and rose to his feet.
Shinobi training with the intelligence service had been easy compared to this.
“What I hear is, since the death of Gobo-in, the palace has been full of men from the refinery.”
Sashichi peered down at the washing area of the bathhouse as he spoke, a serious expression on his face.
“Is that so?” Jinnai said. He poured himself another cup of sake and took a thoughtful sip.
Perhaps because today was both the Ebisu-ko Festival and a gift day, the mezzanine above the changing area was even li
velier than usual. Games of go and shogi were in progress. Some customers were gambling, while others, like Jinnai, were simply enjoying a drink after their bath.
Sashichi was the second son of the Arita family, designated emissaries to Tempu from the Utsuki domain. Sashichi was a samurai by rank, but his older brother had already inherited the main family line, leaving Sashichi to a life of leisurely dissipation. The family had bundled him off to Kyuzo’s school at the age of thirty to get him out of their hair.
He could be impulsive, and it showed, but he wasn’t malicious. He had a way with people and a knack for automata, which seemed to suit his nature.
“I also hear there’s been no smoke from the refinery chimneys in quite some time.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Just between you and me, the word is that the Sacred Vessel from the Age of Myth has been dug up.” To judge from his tone, all of Kyuzo’s other students had heard the rumor already.
If enough people were on a project together, word was bound to get out.
“Kyuzo must have been summoned to the castle to inspect their find,” Jinnai muttered, as if to himself.
Several days ago, Lord Fujibayashi, governor of Saumi and head of the refinery, had come to see Kyuzo for the first time since dismissing him from his position as assistant.
Jinnai doubted the shogunate had decided that Kyuzo was trustworthy after all. If they were drafting him into their project anyway, something remarkable must be afoot.
Kyuzo had left Jinnai with instructions to watch over his household but had given him no information about why he was going to the castle or when he would be back.
In fact, Kyuzo had ordered Jinnai not to investigate any further, but this sat poorly with Jinnai’s nature, and Eve seemed worried too. So Jinnai had been casually questioning all of the other students with some connection to the shogunate, however slight. Today it was Sashichi’s turn.
