by John Healey
Given that the history of his own island nation went back just as far, the young Samurai could not glean any correlation between this King who did not fight and the age of his empire. But perhaps it did have something to do with size. It was said that in China, after a millennium of struggle, the Emperors were raised from an early age to spend their days much as the King before him probably did: surrounded by guards willing to shed their blood for him, by squinting advisors badly remunerated who did the grueling work of administration, and by doctors who spent their mornings studying the Sovereign’s stool. According to what he had learned from speaking with the Duke, the early leaders of Rome had been fighters, military men, and generals. But as time went on and their empire grew large and fat with wealth and complicated by the strains of keeping control over so many disparate lands and peoples, its leadership became hereditary, as well, and the Roman Emperors no longer wielded swords.
Hasekura Tsunenaga presented the Christian King with a letter written in the hand of Date Masamune. It conveyed the Lord’s most heartfelt greetings and salutations. It asked for a treaty of trade and encouraged more Christian missionaries to visit Sendai.
The herald held the letter that was an opened scroll, as Father Sotelo, translating, read it aloud with Hasekura Tsunenaga at his side. As the King listened, he noticed that the Duke of Medina-Sidonia and a young Samurai with pleasing features were near enough to peer at the scroll, as well. After it was rolled shut and retied and handed to the King but taken by the Duke of Lerma, the King declared that he would gladly take the requests under consideration. Then he addressed Hasekura Tsunenaga directly through Father Sotelo.
‘Is it true that all of your men have been baptized upon landing in New Spain?’
‘Yes Your Majesty.’
The King looked about at his courtiers and began to clap until every other Christian in the room joined in.
‘And is it true that you yourself shall be baptized here with us in Madrid?’
‘Yes Your Majesty,’ replied the priest.
This led to more clapping. When it died down, the Duke of Lerma spoke, looking first at the King and then at Hasekura Tsunenaga.
‘The ceremony shall take place on the 17th of February in the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales. My brother, the Archbishop of Toledo, will perform the rite. I shall be your godfather and the King your witness.’
This elicited thunderous applause. During it, the King gave the Duke of Medina-Sidonia a smile and a nod and stared again at Shiro.
Everyone was then invited into an adjacent hall where a reception took place in honor of the foreigners. This chamber was even larger than the first, and brighter. It was filled with paintings and lined with a continuous row of clear windows overlooking wet gardens and the narrow river far below. The Duke of Medina-Sidonia’s oldest son and heir, Juan Mañuel, was there along with his wife, Juana de Sandoval, who was the daughter of the Duke of Lerma. Also present were Guada’s father, Don Rodrigo, and Marta Vélez. Shiro observed how in this room another side of the King emerged. Having concluded his business, the Monarch no longer appeared interested in conversing further with Hasekura Tsunenaga and the unctuous Franciscan, preferring instead to gossip with those he knew.
The Duke of Medina-Sidonia, along with his son, his daughter-in-law, and Shiro, approached the King and the Duke of Lerma. Before the Admiral of the High Seas could offer his formal greetings, the King spoke first.
‘I understand congratulations are in order, Alonso.’
‘Your Majesty?’
‘I received your letter, your upcoming nuptials, or have you changed your mind?’
‘No I have not, and thank you, Sire.’
‘She must be quite special indeed.’
‘That she is, Your Majesty. But there is still the question of an annulment.’
‘Details,’ said the King. ‘We shall work it out. But why marry her at all, man? You’ve already got your heir here. You and I have done our duty to God and country. Since the Queen passed away, I’ve never once considered remarriage. It seems to me, and with the blessings of God, that we now deserve the pleasure of variety, do we not?’
The Duke of Lerma, thought to be even more pious than his liege, reacted with a somber scowl, pretending to disapprove of a view he heartily shared in private. The scowl was also meant to show some solidarity with what he assumed his daughter might be thinking.
‘I’ve known the variety you speak of, Your Majesty’ said the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. ‘And I’ve tired of it. It seems at heart I am a romantic.’
‘Well put, Alonso,’ said the King. ‘If you do not invite me to the ceremony I shall be very put out.’
‘It will be an honor.’
‘It is an example to us all,’ said the King, ‘to see a man your age, still … how shall I put it … gallivanting. Juan Mañuel, what do you think of your father’s engagement?’
‘I will be glad to see him accompanied at this stage of his life,’ the son replied. ‘I know my mother would have wished it for him as well.’
‘A fine sentiment,’ said the King. ‘Have you met the young woman?’
‘I have not, Your Majesty. Not yet.’
‘He’s been keeping her from you. Probably wise.’
Then he looked at Juana de Sandoval. ‘Watch out for this one, Doña Juana, if he starts to take after his father, you’ll have to chain him down.’
The Duke of Lerma felt a twinge, and his mustache suddenly itched, worried that his daughter, whom he did not know very well, might stammer or respond with something too serious. He needn’t have been concerned.
‘If it comes to that, Your Majesty,’ she said, ‘I shall make sure to affix the chain to where most it pains.’
She knew this was just the sort of thing the King relished.
‘Ouch!’ exclaimed the Monarch.
‘Alonso,’ he then said, ‘Who is this young man at your side from the Japanese Delegation?’
‘This is Shiro San Your Majesty, a Prince, directly related to Date Masamune, the author of the letter read aloud to you this morning.’
Shiro bowed, and the King was pleased.
‘He is also fluent is our language,’ the Duke continued, ‘taught as a boy by the Franciscan priest.’
‘Most impressive. How do you like Spain, young man?’
‘I am entranced, Your Majesty, and today more than ever, for the honor of your company of course, but as well because of these extraordinary paintings. They are like nothing I have ever seen.’
‘But surely painters ply their craft in your country.’
‘They do, Your Majesty, but with a very different style and technique. I have never seen such naturalism, such depth of color. I am astonished.’
‘You are an aesthete, I see.’
‘He is also a devil with a sword,’ said the Duke. ‘He saved my life with it last month.’
‘Is that so,’ said the King, ‘an unusual combination indeed. Tell me, Shiro San, what convinced you to convert to our faith, to become a Catholic?’
‘I believe what most persuaded me was the Christian concept of forgiveness.’
‘Ah yes,’ the Monarch replied. ‘A fine answer, and a thing far easier to preach than practice.’
Shiro bowed again.
‘I hope we get to see more of you,’ the King concluded.
Shiro was forced to amend his first impression of the Monarch. The ease with which the King exercised his power was novel, his relaxed manner, his range of interests, and his gift for expressing himself. Date Masamune had never spoken to Shiro like this. Date Masamune was physically rigid. Even when relaxing, like that day in the bath and at tea afterwards, he stood, sat, and kneeled straight and square. Perhaps it was the Japanese way. Perhaps it was an effect from having known so many battles. Perhaps, Shiro even wondered if the Lord was more relaxed with others and only rigid with him because he was ashamed of him.
Three people paid careful attention to the spectacle of Shiro engaged in suc
h animated conversation with the King of Spain: Hasekura Tsunenaga, Father Sotelo, and Marta Vélez. This latter personage, dressed in black, approached the young Samurai as soon as she found the proper opportunity.
‘Do you remember me?’ she asked.
Shiro bowed.
‘Of course I do, my lady.’
‘I knew,’ she said, pointing at him with her closed fan, ‘from the moment we met that you were different from the rest, and that there would be a profitable future in store for you.’
This woman, he thought, is a trouble-maker, a Yoku-shi-gaki. She had all the airs of a flattering temptress, guaranteed to transform whatever business or relation one might engage in with her into pain and trouble.
‘I am quite like my other Samurai brothers,’ he said. ‘And my future, anyone’s, is entirely unpredictable, madam.’
She waved his adolescent philosophizing aside.
‘Do you recall our first conversation?’ she asked.
‘Something to do with baths and bathing,’ he replied.
‘Precisely,’ she said. Now she was the flattered one. ‘Well, here you are in Madrid. My offer still stands. I have company this evening, but if you were to come by my home tomorrow after sunset, the bath would be all yours to enjoy.’
He bowed again, stalling. Trouble or not, he thought, a bath was a bath.
‘And how shall I know how to find it?’
‘It’s the number Six on the Carrer de San Jerónimo. A twenty-minute walk from here.’
Feeling indisposed, Don Rodrigo left the reception early, and Marta Vélez went with him. As Shiro watched them leave, he was more interested in the physiognomy of the gentleman than the lady’s, for it intrigued him to observe the man who had sired Guada. He looked for points of comparison but found few. Grown red-faced and portly from too many years of excessive food and drink, the man bore scant resemblance to his exquisite daughter. The coloring perhaps, Shiro thought, and a certain bearing. Despite his digestive afflictions, the nobleman moved with grace.
Once outside, the couple stood under shelter from what by then was only a drizzle. They were waiting for her carriage to pull up. Across the way, Marta noticed a common-looking young woman with a somber gentleman in humble garb at her side arguing with one of the royal guards. She swore she heard the girl pronounce the word Shiro. Marta Vélez asked Don Rodrigo to bear with her a moment while she walked over to sate her curiosity. Deferred to by the guard, Marta soon convinced an initially reluctant Rocío Sánchez that she would be more than happy to ensure that Shiro receive the young woman’s note on the following day.
Back in the reception hall, broad shafts of clean light with an amber tint shot through the windows as the rain abated, causing all within to comment. The Infantas in residence and their coterie moved outside into a protected garden to breathe the fresh air. The Duke of Lerma was eager to curtail the event as soon as possible, for he had further business to attend to and a romantic assignation with a tutor of his children, a Rabbi’s daughter from Toledo. It was to take place at his sumptuous Madrid residence, the Quinta del Prior in the famous camerín, lined with paintings. Smitten by her a year earlier, he had obtained a writ of exemption that allowed her to remain in his employ free from persecution.
For the Spaniards in attendance, the novelty of the Japanese Delegation had all but worn off. Made sleepy by the assortment of sweetmeats, ham, and sherry, most were looking to be on their way home for a siesta. The King sensed it and began to make his farewells, moving from group to group. When he came upon Shiro and the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, he asked them to accompany him on the following day to the Pardo Palace, which was hidden within the royal hunting grounds just north of the city. As the King left the hall, the Duke of Lerma assured the Monarch that he would see to it that the Japanese and their Franciscan translator would be properly bid adieu and taken care of for the rest of the evening.
Hasekura Tsunenaga watched as the King of Spain patted Shiro on the back before taking leave, and he had to marvel at the young man’s success. He, too, was tired from the strain of being so long in such a foreign land, tired from having to stand like a mummy next to the odorous priest, unable to speak his own mind directly to their hosts. He wished to retire and lie down, alone, and collect his wits. Looking out at the colorful women in the wet garden, he wondered if his father had already been beheaded back in Sendai. He wondered at this strange pantomime he had been coerced into by Date Masamune.
Upon reaching her residence, Marta Vélez put Don Rodrigo to bed and was more than pleased to observe him drift off into a deep sleep that would last until the morning. Left to her own devices, she opened the note the girl had handed her:
Esteemed Shiro—I beg and pray these words reach your eyes, for I believe you were a trusted friend of my husband, Diego Molina, who sailed with you across the world and who was vilely murdered in the olive groves where he worked so tirelessly. I found him bound to a tree and run through by a sword. He was on the verge of death, and his last words to me were that I should tell you it was the Nobleman, the ‘knave,’ the two of you met in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Diego was a good man, a decent man. I waited for him for many years to return from his travels, only to find him thus assaulted after only a month of happiness together. I shall never recover nor do I wish to. I who have no connection with power or nobility plead with you to honor him by avenging his death. May God bless you and protect you. Rocío Sánchez de Molina.
Julian, Marta thought to herself, what have you done? And what should I do? Though she knew at once the answer. In the end, the foreigner was someone of impure blood and not one of them, an appealing distraction for sure and perhaps a delicacy to be savored on the following evening, but she would not hand him the note under any circumstances. And on the following morning, she paid a retainer of Don Rodrigo who traveled with him and to whom she had always been generous to take the note and deliver it into the hand of Don Julian.
– XXVI –
In which Shiro makes a powerful friend and a violation is foretold
The Duke of Lerma collected Shiro and the Duke of Medina-Sidonia at dawn, and with an escort of forty men, they galloped into the woods north of Madrid. Having decided, despite the King’s infatuation, that the young Japanese man was far beneath him, the Duke of Lerma spent the journey conversing with his fellow nobleman about family matters, court intrigues, and when the Duke of Medina-Sidonia’s annulment might be expected from the Vatican.
Shiro did not mind and was content to admire the scenery. The sky had cleared completely, and a semicircle of mountains shone brightly before them, their worn-down peaks covered with gleaming snow. As they entered the royal grounds, herds of deer and wild boars ran about them. The Palace, hidden in the woods, had an exterior with a pinkish hue that contrasted most pleasingly with the greenery surrounding it. The Samurai was enchanted.
As they approached, the King came at them on horseback on a path from the east and joined them, calling out a hearty welcome. A meal was served in the entrance hall. Shiro ate very little and only drank water.
‘Seeing as how you have expressed such enthusiasm for our painters, young man, I wanted to show you something very special,’ said the King, standing from the table as the meal concluded.
The Duke of Medina-Sidonia gave Shiro a light pat on the back in approbation for the favorable impression he had made.
‘A fire swept through here some years ago,’ the King continued, ‘but the painting I wish to show you was spared, and I have taken it ever since as a good omen.’
They walked through wide hallways lined with portraits and still lifes by Anthonis Mor, his pupil Alonso Sánchez Coello, and the latter’s disciple Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. Taking a turn into a windowless room lined with red velvet, the King walked right past Correggio’s Rape of Ganymede. Shiro, keeping apace with the Monarch and the limping Grandee, could not believe his eyes. The painting depicted the figure of a naked boy-child wrapped in a cloak the color of faded pomegranate wh
o was being lifted off the ground into a Mediterranean blue sky by an enormous bird of prey. An autumnal poplar tree stood to the left, and a startled dog just below was barking at the spectacle, looking up.
They soon arrived at the King’s destination, a room that occupied a far corner of the palace. It was a high-ceilinged chamber that faced the open countryside looking north and west. It had simple furniture and two modestly proportioned windows between which hung a large painting some four meters long and two meters high.
‘This,’ said the King to his guests, ‘is my favorite.’
It was a dark landscape portraying, at an indeterminate time of day—twilight perhaps, or early morning—a clearing in the woods. Moving from left to right, a man blows upon a clarion made from an animal’s horn, a man it seems in service to a hunting party behind him and out of sight. Another man, younger and athletically rendered, with two fine dogs on leashes, is calling out to the unseen hunting party while pointing at a buck by a stream. The buck is seen in the background at the far left of the painting, being set upon by dogs that have been unleashed by yet another colleague. Though handsome, clean shaven, and well put together, the second youth is oblivious to the fact that a young woman seated on the ground next to him, his sister or his sweetheart perhaps, is being spoken to and more than likely propositioned by a heavily bearded, naked Satyr facing her, his back to the viewer, his head adorned with a simple wreath of laurel. But the Satyr is not looking at her directly. He is looking up toward the very center of the painting that is delineated by the slender trunk of a tall tree on whose upper branch can be seen the naked, infantile personage of Eros. This pudgy little god is aiming his bow down toward two other forms that dominate the entire composition; a naked woman partially covered by a shroud, young, blond, somewhat corpulent in the fashion of the time and seemingly asleep, and another Satyr—this one with a more cunning and avaricious appearance than the first. The Satyr is pulling the shroud off the maiden. But his gaze is not affixed upon her appealing flesh yet, but rather at the arrow being pointed at him from above. It seems as if these Satyrs are mainly interested in the figure up in the tree between them, there to facilitate what will happen next, and it is as if the hunting party of ordinary mortals around them with their dogs cannot see them.
