“You’re right,” she said, nodding, “let’s go get that boat.”
It was early morning and there was only one ferry ready to depart in the harbour, a narrow vessel with a single sail and a square of canvas stretched over the deck as the only protection from the elements. A single samurai in a dark purple hooded cloak had just disembarked, paid the fare and hurried into the village without giving the three travellers a glance.
“Can you take us to Kumamoto?” Nagomi asked the ferryman.
“Kumamoto? That’s too far for this tiny thing. I can take you across the bay to Shimabara, where the big ferries are,” said the helmsman. “In fact, that’s just where I picked up that gentleman,” he added, nodding towards the fast disappearing samurai.
Satō watched the shoreline fade away as the small boat, barely big enough to fit the three of them, travelled eastwards at full sail. The westerly wind blew strong. The clouds receded a little and the rain stopped.
Of the three travellers only the foreigner was used to sailing. Poor Nagomi, first time at sea, sat on the bottom with her eyes closed, praying, her face a delicate shade of green. Satō made a valiant effort of trying to stay on deck, but, as the little vessel entered the wide waters of the bay and started rising, falling, bobbing and rolling on the high waves, she also had to sit down near the edge of the boat. In the end, the Westerner joined the girls, settling on the wet bench under the canvas windbreak.
The sea calmed down after an hour, and Satō stopped leaning over the side of the boat. Her skin returned to a healthy colour and she could pick up a conversation with Bran. She still could not get her head around the fact that the boy was suddenly speaking fluent Yamato.
“Not even the Overwizard can talk our language so effortlessly.”
“I wish I knew how it happened,” the boy admitted, “it would be a most valuable secret to any scholar.”
“Or a spy,” added Satō, observing the boy carefully. The High Priestess had never mentioned he would gain such an ability after the ritual. What if he had understood them all along and only pretended not to?
She realised her stare was rude and turned her eyes towards the west, where the easternmost cape of the Mogi Peninsula, jutting out into the sea like the back of a great whale, was slowly disappearing beyond the horizon. It reminded her of the few sea journeys she had taken with her father and tears started welling up in her eyes. She focused on the more recent past.
“I wonder what he meant,” she said.
“Who?” Bran asked.
“That monk, what did he mean when he said they owe the Suwa Shrine a great deal?”
“He means the Sun God rebellion.” Nagomi spoke softly without opening her eyes, her lips trembling with nausea. Satō turned to her in surprise. “The priests at Suwa protected the monks and treasures of the Mogi Temple when it was attacked and razed to the ground by the rebels.”
“Tell us more!”
Satō moved closer to her friend. She loved tales of old times, even more so if they were bloody and violent.
“That’s all I know... I saw this written in the shrine chronicle. It was in the fourteenth year of the Kan’ei era.”
“I remember that year,” said Bran unexpectedly. His eyes turned from green to black, gazing towards the western horizon. There was a melancholic sadness in his voice. “The muskets of the heretics poured lead like rain on our heads; their arrows turned the day into night; their spears were like blades of rice in the field. From hamlet to hamlet they went, ravaging the shrines, plundering the altars and melting the sacred mirrors into weapons, saying their God had conquered our Sun Goddess, and all other Gods were just demons in disguise. They burned the temples and slew bald monks by the dozens. A youth of mere sixteen summers led them to their doom — Messenger from Heavens they called him. On these shores the mutineers clashed with the samurai army, overwhelmed them and chased the recreant cravens all the way back to Kiyō.”
He finished and mused at the waves in silence. At last his eyes turned back to green. The boy snapped back to the present.
“What just happened?” Satō asked suspiciously. If it was just a performance, it was a very convincing one. Perhaps he was telling the truth after all…
“It’s…” Bran hesitated. “The Spirit’s memories o’erpowered me…”
“Is it dangerous?”
“I… don’t think so,” he replied.
She sensed he wasn’t telling the whole truth.
“What was this vision?” he asked. “Who were the heretics?”
“Those who shared the religion of the Westerners,” explained Nagomi.
“The Vasconians,” added Satō. “The Bataavians were on our side.”
“The Sun Priests!” the boy said. “They had reached even here?”
Nagomi only shrugged.
“I don’t know much. The heretic beliefs were banned a long time ago. The rebellion you spoke of was their last stand.”
“That Spirit inside you…” Satō looked into Bran’s eyes, trying to discern a trace of the alien entity. “Do you know its name?”
“He calls himself Itakura Shigemasa.”
The wizardess thought carefully. The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“What else do you know about him?”
“He styles himself Taishō. What does that mean?”
Satō opened her eyes wide and gasped.
“Chief Commander!”
“I dreamt of leading a great multitude of men to their deaths,” Bran said, nodding solemnly. “I thought ‘twas merely a nightmare…”
Now she remembered. Itakura was the name of a clan of famous warriors and daimyos from the northern province of Mikawa.
“He must have fought at the Shimabara siege,” she guessed.
“It may yet be a good thing that you have bonded with such a powerful and wise Spirit,” said Nagomi.
Or very dangerous, Satō tought.
“I would gladly be rid of him,” replied Bran.
“You would not be able to talk to us then,” Nagomi said and smiled.
“However jarring your manner of speech sounds,” added Satō.
“Be it truly so strange to thy ears?”
“It’s… outdated, archaic. I suppose it’s how Shigemasa spoke two hundred years ago.”
Or how a Vasconian spy would know it.
“You can understand everything we say, can’t you?” the wizardess asked.
“I do, although sometimes it sounds to me…” the boy hesitated, “rude, uncouth. Some words I even feel are… obscene.”
Satō chuckled. She knew that, disregarding some boyish quirks, she spoke the most ornate style of the language, as befitted a daughter of an aristocrat. She had been taught that nothing ever changed in Yamato. The islands, as the poets, scholars and court historians told about them, were ageless, set in their ways forever. Any transformation, any progress was simply unthinkable. The system imposed by the Taikun was supposed to be as unalterable as the sky above and the earth below. This is what everyone had been telling her — everyone except her father.
“Our people have always changed and adjusted to the circumstances,” he had once told his daughter, “Since the earliest days. We’ve learnt from the Qin how to plant rice and grow silk. We’ve learnt to build houses that withstand earthquakes and typhoons. When the Horse Lords invaded, we had to learn their strategies to beat them back. When the Westerners came, we learned from them anything they were willing to teach us and more — their magic, their technology, we’ve even tried their religion — but we saw it did not fit our needs… This is how Yamato grew to such greatness — through evolution, not through stagnation, no matter what the courtiers at Edo would want us to believe. The Yamato should be like water, and the Taikun had frozen us into ice — but ice can break.”
“For now we can pretend it’s an accent from Mikawa,” she said. “I will try to teach you the modern manner, or you will draw too much attention.”
“I shall endeavour.
”
“I will try,” she corrected him, and chuckled again as the boy winced hearing her “uncouth” words. “You can practise with the commoners, they won’t know any better.”
CHAPTER VI
The boat turned north around the tip of another peninsula, and entered a narrow inlet.
“Be this Shimabara already?” Bran asked the boat’s steersman, looking at a rather disappointingly tiny village at the end of the inlet through his telescope.
The device drew the man’s attention, and Bran had to explain he had bought it at the great market in Kiyō.
“No, kind tono, that’s Kuchinotsu. It takes two days to sail to Shimabara and we’re not likely to reach another port before the sun sets.”
“I trust they have inns there.”
“There’s a guesthouse by the pier that a cousin of mine runs.”
“I see. How very shrewd of thee,” said Bran.
The old steersman grinned, exposing his toothless gums. His smile was contagious.
Satō looked jealously at the instrument, but was too polite to ask outright. Bran noticed the boy’s stare and gave it to him.
“We don’t get things like that at the market,” he said, admiring the craftsmanship and power of the lenses. “Keep it safe,” he added, reluctantly giving the spyglass back, “in the wrong hands something like this could start a war.”
“It’s just a small hand-held,” Bran replied. “The case has more magic than the spyglass.”
“Why, what’s in the case?”
“It is made of a selkie skin, so it shall never sink.”
He remembered Samuel saying these exact words at the birthday party. His face must have reflected his mood, for Satō asked immediately:
“What’s wrong?”
“The man who gave it to me is now dead,” Bran replied with a sigh.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” He shook his head slowly. “I had only known him a few months. He was one of the crew on Ladon.”
“What was it like on the ship?” the boy enquired.
Bran rotated the barrel of the telescope in his hand and put it back into the selkie-skin case before answering, slowly and carefully rolling the words of the new language off his tongue.
“Crowded… Dirty… Noisy… Smelly. The food was bad, the water stale. Most of the time, nothing happened. For days and days the sea passed underneath and clouds above, and that was the only change, but then we would get an order and the ship would alter its course. There would be some sea battle or a landing, or just a diplomatic visit, and we would see another part of the world, completely different to what we had seen a few weeks before. My father told me no two harbours look the same.”
“That sounds amazing…” Satō whispered.
Bran nodded in silent agreement.
The boat rocked, bumping into the wooden pier.
“Kuchinotsu!” announced the steersman.
Bran and Nagomi settled at the guesthouse for the night while Satō had to stay in the servants’ room by the stable. At nightfall she smuggled herself into their quarters through the garden veranda.
The night was still young. They drank cha, sitting for a moment in silence. At last Satō found the courage to ask the question she had longed to pose ever since she had learned who the foreigner really was.
“Bran-sama,” she started, “I’m sorry to keep asking you questions…”
“It is understandable,” he replied, “I have many questions as well.”
“What’s it like to fly a dorako?”
Bran put down the half-empty teacup and pondered the answer with his eyes closed, remembering.
“Imagine thou… you are standing on the top of the highest mountain,” he started carefully. “You canst — can, sorry, see all the way to the horizon, for a dozen ri or more. The fields, the pastures, the forests, a lonely village in the valley… the people and animals below are as tiny as ants. Rivers are as thin ribbons of blue, crossed by ribbons of brown dirt roads. A strong cold mountain wind is howling around you, tugging at your clothes, forcing tears into your eyes. Imagine now that the mountain beneath thy feet starts to move,” Bran continued. “All the fields and pastures and forests become splashes of colours, blurred as thou fliest past. The wind grows stronger, but it’s not cold anymore — the dragon’s breath blows around thee, keeps thou warm. Thou holdst onto the reins as it goes ever higher and ever faster. The mountain is gone and there is nothing but the blue sky all around thee, the Earth a forgotten memory somewhere far below…”
“Can you reach the clouds?” Satō asked dreamily.
“Oh, aye, easily, if it’s a day such as today, when they hang low o’er the land. The clouds are cold and wet, like a very thick mist. When the day is cold and overcast, thou could even fly through the clouds for a short while, where there is always sun, but it’s difficult for a human to last long at that height; not enough air to breathe.”
“How long did you have to learn before you could fly?”
“I was flying with my dragon before I joined the Academy, but that was because my father showed me how and looked after me — when he was not on one of his expeditions, that is. Otherwise thou needst to first learn some navigation and special spells that slow one’s fall. One can easily lose one’s head in the clouds. When we find my dorako I will take thee for a flight,” Bran said unexpectedly, and Satō jumped in surprise and disbelief, her eyes growing large and round.
“Eeh! Really?”
“Verily,” the Westerner said, nodding, “thou art light enough, there should be no trouble, and thou, of course, if thou wishest,” he said turning to Nagomi, who also listened to his tale.
The girl smiled and waved her hands.
“Oh, there’s no need to trouble yourself. Sacchan’s the one who’s crazy about dorako.”
“I sure am! I’m going to dream about them again tonight… but it’s getting late. I should go back to the servants’ quarters,” said Satō.
She forgot about her suspicions for the night. What did it matter if the boy was a spy, after all? Her father might have worried about the intruding foreigners, but she didn’t care. All that she cared for was that, thanks to Bran, for the first time in days she dreamt of something else other than the man in crimson robe and her father’s agonising screams.
The simple breakfast served at the guesthouse surprised Bran. He was growing used to the strange familiarity with which Yamato began to greet him at every corner since his struggle with Shigemasa. It felt almost as if he had come back to a country where he had been born and raised, after a fifteen-year-long journey to Gwynedd.
This, however, was new. He could not recognise the dishes from the memories he shared with the general. A basket of tiny fish and prawns deep-fried in crispy batter was a taste unknown to him, as were the slices of sweet yellow potato and firm-fleshed orange pumpkin. The rice was too white, the fish too raw and the soy sauce too refined and watery. Everything tasted exquisite though, no matter what it was called or from what it was made. The boy wondered if having the Spirit inside him affected his taste buds as well, or was this food really as perfect as it now seemed?
He was trying not to think too much of what had happened to him back at the pine forest. It was too bizarre to contemplate, trying to make sense of it was like trying to understand a dream. Why was the land of his mind empty, dry and red? Why had the blue sapphire ring appeared in this outlandish scenery, why had it lit up and crumbled the tower of grey stone? He looked at his finger. The stone was calm, quiet, dark. Nothing peculiar about it, he remembered Doctor Campion’s words. The ring’s appearance in the red darkness must have been merely some figment of his strained imagination.
“Is the food not to your liking, dear guest?” the girl serving the food, the guesthouse keeper’s young daughter, enquired with a concerned voice, seeing the straw basket still full of fried fish. “I can bring something else…”
Her extreme politeness towards him contrasted
starkly with what he remembered of the tafarn wenches in Gwynedd. At first he thought she was kind to him because of his noble status, but he observed she behaved that way to all other guests.
There was nothing here that resembled the sleazy, noisy, dirty western taverns with which he was familiar. The common room was spacious and clean, the guests — mostly — quiet and well-behaved, the food delivered promptly and without fault.
He was awed and humbled by all this civility, until he noticed the sharp swords most men in the inn carried. He remembered the dead samurai he had seen in the street of Kiyō and the warnings of the interpreter. Suddenly the smiles and bows of the guests and the staff no longer seemed as genuine as before.
“We know little of such delicacies in Mikawa,” he answered with a practiced smile and a nod.
“Delicacies, tono?” The girl laughed coquettishly, partially covering her mouth with her hand, but exposing teeth daubed with black ink — in the fashion he had seen on some women in the city and which repulsed him at first but was now becoming oddly appealing. The long sleeve of her kimono fell loose, revealing a shapely forearm. “It’s only some tenpura. Surely you eat better food in the north, so close to the capital?”
“Ah, yes, well.” Bran coughed. “Maybe in the daimyo’s castle, but I come from a small village in the mountains,” he bluffed.
“What brings you all the way to Chinzei?”
Bran had no ready answer. He was too busy staring at the girl’s impeccably white neckline — surprisingly attractive for a village girl — to think of his new identity. He turned to Nagomi in slight panic — Satō, in his servant’s disguise, was not allowed to speak in the presence of “superiors”.
The apprentice gave him an odd look before speaking.
“Karasu-sama is on a pilgrimage to thank the kami for saving his village from the famine.”
“Ah, then you’ve been to Suwa to pray to the Morisaki, god of harvest!” the girl said, beaming approvingly.
“Aye, that is correct.” Bran nodded, sighing quietly with relief and smiling gratefully at the apprentice.
Impeccably white neckline, he thought, astonished at himself. What am I thinking about? What do I care for how a woman’s neckline looks?
The Year of the Dragon Omnibus Page 30
