Breakfast was already laid out, with rice, dried fish and vegetables. The rescued four were stiff from their ride, but happy to be free. Jiro bustled up, waving a map.
“Minna-sama, ohayō gozaimasu. Good morning all! Glad you are up at last! We’ve got much to do!” He indicated on the map where he had hidden the ship. They were a short hike, maybe fifteen minutes, to the village and the coast. They were a morning’s flight to Aoba castle, in the great northern city of Sendai, where the Date family had ruled with an iron fist and considerable family drama throughout the Tokugawa period.
“Aren’t we too exposed here?” asked Tōru, still concerned about the ship’s visibility.
“The Date clan have joined your Lord Aya and Lord Tōmatsu and Lord Shimazu in their efforts to defend the country against the foreigners. You are safe here in the north. Lord Date Yoshitaka-sama has personally ordered the borders of his realm defended against any who would ride north to take you. Even the Shogun will think twice about provoking Lord Date. Relax and enjoy some breakfast! You all stink, so first order of business is a bath, in the village. Sorry we have no ofuro aboard—the water is too heavy to carry when we are flying at nearly full capacity like this.”
“Does Lord Abe know where we are?” asked Masuyo. If Lord Abe knew, then her father knew.
“I dispatched a rider to the village, to send a message at the distillery. We are certain they are monitoring our line, given what happened to you. We sent a false message, claiming to be heading west with you, as the Shogun’s men would expect. Lord Date knows you are on your way, and Lord Abe knows where we are actually headed. He’ll know it’s false. We cannot communicate correct details until we get the code key to him, but he’ll know we have you. We’re back to old-fashioned riders for messages. Never thought the Shogun’s people would catch on to the technology so quickly.”
Tōru laughed. “Well, it’s a good thing, actually. We’ll need to communicate throughout all the domains if the foreigners come. Glad they listened so carefully to our lessons, Takamori!”
As they hiked to the village, shuffling through the layer of fresh fallen snow, Jiro caught them up on his progress over the past three months. “This is only the first of the dirijibi. As you can see, it works! We are building ten more, throughout the domains, thanks to your lectures. Lord Date in Sendai is building two. One to fight the Americans here, one to fight them in America.”
“Fight them? What are you saying?” asked Tōru, alarmed.
“One of his ancestors was a shipbuilder. He ordered his retainer Hasakira Tsunenaga to sail ships all the way to Rome and the Americas a couple of centuries ago. Lord Date wishes to revive his ancestor’s exploratory spirit. He is most anxious to speak with you directly, as he wonders if the dirijibi can make it to America’s shores. He—he contemplates attacking the Americans first rather than waiting for them to come here as you say they will.”
“Oh no! No, no, no. First, these ships are not strong enough for the journey, at least not these designs. But we don’t want to attack America, just get her to leave us alone!” cried Tōru.
“The Date clan is known for being ambitious and aggressive,” said Asano thoughtfully in his dry way. “I would have thought two hundred and fifty years of peace would have calmed them down a bit, but I see not.”
“Good thing Date is our ally and not our enemy,” added Saigo.
“I’m an airship pilot, not a diplomat,” said Jiro, promoting himself from his previously coveted position of “engineer.” “All the politics and history is above me. But yes, Saigo-sama, Lord Date frightens even his friends and retainers. He frightens me, too.”
Tōru grimaced. He was glad his ideas were taking root, but realized events were rapidly escalating out of his control, with unforeseen consequences. What other hotheads had new and dangerous plans? Had he accidentally kindled a revolution? A war with America? He only wanted to warn the Shogun, to strengthen his homeland and create opportunity for her people, not start wars. He rubbed his neck, afraid to follow the chain of thought too far.
He turned to simpler matters.
“How are we doing on trains and tracks?” asked Tōru. If armies had to be rushed from the inland to the coasts to defend against a foreign invasion, he saw the trains as important as a good supply of guns and ammunition.
“Tracks, great,” said Jiro. “We don’t have to build in secret anymore. The Shogun himself sees their benefit to his rule. Or at least Lord Abe so claims in the Shogun’s name. He commanded all the daimyō to connect their hans to the line he has ordered built alongside the Tōkaidō roadway between Kyoto and Edo. He’s going to make the daimyō visit Edo more frequently on his sankin kotai exchange policy. Regular meetings. The lords hate it, mostly, but they want trains too, so they are building as fast as they can. Lord Date is building a line south to Edo as well, the Tōhoku Line. By summer, we should have lines stretching from here in the far north to the Satsuma lands in the southwest.”
“That’s tracks. What about engines?” asked Tōru.
Jiro made a face. “You are not a good engineer, sir, or at least not a good engineering sensei teacher. The students in your engineering school have all failed in their first attempts to cast the engines. I blame you, sir.”
Tōru laughed, “Sorry. I needed you to explain those bits.”
“Indeed you did, sir.”
“To be fair, you failed the first two times too!” said Tōru to the former blacksmith and former engineer, recalling the giant cast iron flower displays now adorning Lord Aya’s courtyard.
“I did, sir. Shinpai wa irimasen, no worry. They will figure it out just as we did. You did do a great job of inspiring them. They are determined to build trains, so trains they will build. Eventually.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Takamori.
They reached the village. After a glorious scrub and steaming bath at the public ofuro, they gathered at the distillery where a bored young bartender served them an indifferent meal. Tōru did not miss the gilded house arrest of Lord Abe’s generous hospitality, but he had grown accustomed to fine food. It was a shock to eat overcooked fish in a sauce that smelled ever so slightly off, over dry stale rice. He had forgotten the poor food of ordinary people during his months of luxury in Lord Aya’s service and as Lord Abe’s guest.
The clatter of the telegraph receiving a message broke into their conversation halfway through the meal. The languid bartender roused himself and rushed to the exotic device. Lacking Chie’s skill, he had to read the dots and dashes off the page.
He ran over to Jiro the second he had sounded out the message.
“Aya Tōmatsu arrive nightfall. Over.”
Masuyo could not hide her relief. She was even happier when Jiro casually asked, “Shall we go get them?”
Soon they were back on the airship, loaded with supplies and freshly clean crew and passengers. Lords Aya and Tōmatsu were on their way, along with a host of other sympathetic daimyō, to Aoba Castle in Sendai. Now that all the hostages were free, they could turn their attention to the next phase in their struggle against the Shogun and their plans to organize a defense of the nation against the foreigners. The sooner they picked up the lords, the sooner the war council could begin.
Finding them took an hour, but a dozen daimyōs and retainers in procession are hardly easy to hide from the air, even when they wish to stay hidden. The daimyos’ party was black against the new-fallen snow. Jiro set down his airship directly in their path, causing several of the lords’ horses to rear up in panic. As his crew tied down anchor lines to nearby trees, calming the bucking ship, Tōru, Takamori and Asano shimmied swiftly down the ropes and ladders cast over the sides. Masuyo watched from above.
Tōru saw Lord Aya and ran to kneel before him. He bowed.
“Sir, good to see you. I have your daughter safe with us, above.”
Lord Aya drew him up, maintaining his dignity for the moment and hiding his own delight at seeing the young man again. “Gokurō. Well done.
” He looked up at the enormous dirigible swaying gently above them. “You actually get people to ride around in that barbaric thing?” he asked, a twinkle in his eye.
“Yes, sir. In fact—”
“Wakatta, wakatta. I get it. You are here to put me in that monstrosity, just like you did with your train. I know how you operate, Himasaki, don’t think I don’t. And you’ve left my wild daughter up there to make me eager to do it.”
Lord Aya grinned at the young samurai and bellowed up to his daughter. “Toranosuke! Sore wa dame da, running around dressed like a savage! What would your poor mother say?”
Even as he scolded and blustered, Lord Aya raced up the ladder to greet his laughing and crying daughter, tangling his feet in his wide hakama skirts as he climbed the ladder. Jiro’s crewmen hauled the old lord unceremoniously over the edge, there being no more elegant way to get him aboard until they had the ship lower and the gangplank extended from the hold below so the horses could board.
The other lords with Lord Tōmatsu, more mindful of their dignity, waited patiently until they could walk aboard, murmuring praise and wonder at the mighty ship. Their horses resisted entering the airship’s hold, but their masters urged the frightened creatures to step aboard until they were safely stabled below. It was difficult to tell who was more panicked, the horses or the lords.
Jiro whispered to Tōru, “Ready to go, sir. All are aboard.”
Tōru sang out, “Brace yourselves, gentlemen. Take us up, Captain Jiro. Next stop, Aoba Castle!”
The ship lifted off, gently this time, in the crisp still late afternoon air, above the glistening snowy fields and forests of the northlands. The Hakudo Maru settled into her voyage to the heart of the north, bearing with her some of the bravest and boldest of Japan’s rebel leaders.
CHAPTER 16
REVOLUTION
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,
make violent revolution inevitable.”
– John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Jiro and his crew landed the Hakudo Maru in a clearing below the castle by the banks of the Hirose River, across from the thriving city of Sendai. Leaving behind the crew to guard the ship, the passengers set out for Aoba Castle.
The city by the river was green and elegant, barely touched with traces of early winter snow, living up to her well-known nickname of Mori no Miyako, the City of Trees. Lord Date, lords of the title both present and past, loved trees and had ordered thousands planted over the decades. Mori no Miyako indeed, the city was lushly adorned by these now mature plantings.
The castle rose above them on a plateau overlooking the city, protected by deep forest to the west and cliffs to the south and east. Though the first daimyō of Sendai and Aoba, Date Masamune, had planned to build more defensive structures to protect the castle, he had never gotten around to the task.
No matter, for men had never taken Aoba Castle, although fire and earthquake had done what they could in the two and a half centuries since the Date clan made the castle their base.The ancient keep was protected by two factors more important than mere walls: the natural defenses of cliffs and forest and the fearsome reputation of the Date lords for long memories and terrible vengeance.
No one messed with House Date.
As the party climbed the long, stoutly guarded road to the castle’s main gate, higher and higher in the cool morning light, Tōru pondered what they should do next. His thoughts had been so focused on survival during their flight that he’d had no time to consider what to do with his sudden freedom.
He smiled to see the telegraph line climbing the hill alongside the road, and the spur of train tracks growing from Sendai to the south, as ant-like workers swarmed over the growing edge of the track. Jiro was correct. His lessons in the workshop during his imprisonment at Lord Abe’s compound were having a rapid and profound impact across many hans, from the original allies in the west, to new supporters here in the north like Lord Date.
Proud as he was to see his ideas and the foreign technologies he had brought home taking root, Tōru was uneasy. He feared events were spiraling out of control, not that he had ever harbored any illusions he controlled anything. In a land where each man knows his rank and position to the finest, most subtle degree, he knew no fisherman’s son, nor even a great daimyō’s unacknowledged illegitimate son, could rise to a leadership role.
He felt responsible, though, for he had brought home the Western technology and fought to share it. If his actions led to dangerous instability, then the suffering of the people would be on his head. True, he had come home from America without much of a plan beyond “make Japan strong by teaching Western technology to anyone who will listen.” He hoped her leaders would use the technology to strengthen Japan.
He had little interest in the cross-currents of politics roiling under the surface, between bakufu loyalists determined to keep the Tokugawa Shoguns in power no matter the cost and the tōzama outer lords, like Lord Shimazu in the west and Lord Date in the north, who favored anything the Shogun disliked. He had learned much about those politics, though, from Kato and Lord Abe during his months of house arrest on Lord Abe’s compound. The Tokugawas had excluded the conquered tōzama lords from the rule of the country for two hundred and fifty years. This slight hardened into long-nursed resentment, slumbering coals that events could blow into bright flame with surprisingly little provocation. The Shoguns mistrusted the tōzama lords, and not without cause.
Such quarrels seemed to Tōru so petty and small next to the greater problems he saw, both with the foreigners and with his homeland’s poverty and stagnation. He had returned from simple patriotism, wanting to be proud of his homeland and make her strong enough to stay independent of the foreigners, even the ones he admired, like his American friends. But over the past year, he had become aware of a deeper need in his homeland, a gaping wretchedness that had nothing to do with the foreigners.
He had grown up in a small fishing village, with the great wealth and power of his father reflected only in his excellent education. Though he knew his father’s world, he never felt part of it, only a visitor by his father’s insistence, tolerated with barely disguised hostility and scorn by his father’s wife and his senior retainers.
Tōru’s day-to-day outlook on life was built around his life as a rural commoner in a poor and neglected fishing village. Life for Jiro and his other childhood playmates was hard, and their parents’ life was hard, and their grandparents’ life had been hard, on back as far as anyone could remember. Nothing had notably changed for the better for centuries, although at least the terrible clan wars of the past had been banished by the Tokugawas’ iron-fisted rule. Tōru’s childhood village friends saw no hope of growth or advancement, only grinding toil from a hard birth to an early death.
Tōru had noticed on his brief return to Iwamatsu that the shabby village of his childhood memories had grown shabbier and more worn, the people ragged and too slender by far. He had now passed through dozens of similarly forgotten villages on his recent travels. He had seen the coarse ugly form poverty takes in the big cities. Tōru pondered how to use the technology he had brought back not just to defend his homeland, but also to build a new and better life for the common people, the ragged villagers he now rode by in the guise of a samurai well mounted on a fine horse.
His thoughts dwelled for a moment on Jiro’s off-hand remark yesterday that Lord Date wanted to attack America with his dirigible. The others laughed it off as a joke, but Tōru shivered at the thought. Lord Date could not comprehend what he was proposing. No one could comprehend the scale and scope of the vast American continent without seeing it personally. No one could understand the ambitions and pride of a young aggressive people still building their nation and how swiftly they would respond.
Tōru had learned in his brief time at the capital that what made sense and what leaders decreed were often two entirely different things. An ambitious lord like Date probably was a danger to peace and stability in the realm, and b
eyond her borders, and therefore a threat to the Shogun, as Lord Abe had patiently explained. Worse yet, rather than solving problems at home, Lord Date was proposing creating new wars. If Lord Date was making a joke, it was a bad one.
Tōru’s idealistic assumption that the quarrelsome daimyōs would unite against the foreign threat had been proven wrong. Instead he seemed to be uniting the tōzama lords against their traditional foes, the Shogun and his supporters. Both sides saw the common threat, but worried more about fighting each other than uniting to meet the foreign threat.
He had thrown in his lot with the tōzama lords accidentally the moment he landed on Lord Abe’s shores, or perhaps back at the moment of his birth as a son, if an unacknowledged one, of Lord Shimazu of the Satsuma clan. But he had no interest in fighting the Shogun. He only wanted to unite the hans to defend against the foreigners. He wanted to open the country to trade, as a powerful nation equal to all the great nations, by showing the foreigners Japan’s strength. He did not want his homeland to fall to foreigners as once-great China had.
His other hopes were also collapsing, hopes the daimyōs and bakufu would use his technologies to build wealth, make a dignified peace with the foreigners from a position of strength and bring prosperity to the common people. His telegraphs and dirigibles and trains seemed to be inspiring the great lords to think instead of war with each other, with the Shogun and with the foreigners. No one was discussing how to create prosperity for the commoners and a strong defensive position for Japan so she could remain independent of foreign rule.
The gates opened as they approached.
Tōru shivered as he passed within.
He was entering the stronghold of an ally, not that of the cruel Shogun who had decreed his death. Even so, the ancient gates and high walls whispered warning. The Date clan reputation for vengeance and aggression was well earned. Interactions with such a clan should be undertaken only with great caution.
Toru: Wayfarer Returns (Sakura Steam Series Book 1) Page 20
