by Boris Akunin
He dangled his long arms and swayed as he hobbled round the room, laughing at the top of his voice. It took Erast Petrovich some time to understand what was wrong. It turned out that they had never seen any white people in the village before, but one of the locals had been in the city many years ago and seen an ugly trained monkey that was also dressed in a curious manner. Fandorin’s eyes were so big and blue that the ignoramuses had taken fright.
Kamata took pleasure in telling Fandorin at length what fools the peasants were. The Japanese had a saying: ‘A family never remains rich or poor for longer than three generations’, and it was true that in the city life was arranged so that in three generations rich men declined into poverty and poor men fought their way up – such was the law of God’s justice. But the boneheads living in the villages had not been able to break out of their poverty for a thousand years. When parents got decrepit and were unable to work, their own children took the old folk into the mountains and left them there to die – in order not to waste food on them. The peasants didn’t wish to learn anything new, they didn’t want to serve in the army. He couldn’t understand how it was possible to build a great Japan with this rabble, but if Tsurumaki-dono took the contract, they’d build it, they’d have to.
Eventually, weary of deciphering his companion’s chatter, the titular counsellor went off to sleep. He cleaned his teeth with ‘Brilliant’ powder and washed himself in his travelling bath, which was most convenient, except that the water smelled strongly of rubber. Meanwhile Masa set out his camp bed, hung the green net over it and inflated the pillow, working furiously with his cheeks.
‘Tomorrow,’ Fandorin said to himself and fell asleep.
The last five ri were a match for the previous day’s eleven. The road immediately started rising steeply and looping between the hills, which reached up higher and higher towards the sky. Fandorin had to dismount from his tricycle and push it by the handlebars, and the young man regretted not having left it in the village.
Well after midday Kamata pointed to a mountain with a snowy peak.
‘Oyama. Now right-right.’
Four thousand feet, thought Fandorin, throwing his head back and gauging it by eye. Not Kazbek, of course, and not Mont Blanc, but a serious elevation, no doubt about it.
The place we are going to is a little off to one side, explained the commander, who was thoughtful and taciturn today. We stretch the line out into single file and keep quiet.
They walked on for about another two hours. Before they entered a narrow but short ravine, Kamata dismounted and divided the brigade into two parts. He ordered the larger group to cover their heads with leaves and crawl through the bottleneck on their stomachs. About ten men remained behind with the pack animals and baggage.
‘Tower. Look,’ he explained curtly to Erast Petrovich, jabbing one finger upwards.
Obviously the enemy had an observation point somewhere close by.
The titular counsellor travelled the two hundred sazhens of the ravine in the same manner as the others. His outfit did not suffer at all, though: specially designed for outings in the mountains, it was equipped with magnificent knee-pads and elbow-pads of black leather. Masa panted along behind him, having refused point blank to stay behind with the mule and the tricycle.
Having passed this dangerous place they moved on, standing erect now, but sticking to the undergrowth and avoiding open areas. Kamata clearly knew the road – either he had been given precise instructions, or he had been here before.
They scrambled up the wooded slope and along a stony stream for at least an hour.
At the top the commander waved his hand and the Black Jackets slumped to the ground, worn out. Kamata gestured for Fandor in to come over to him.
The two of them moved away about a hundred paces to a naked boulder overgrown with moss, from which there was a panoramic view of the mountain peaks around them and the valley stretching out below.
‘The village of the shinobi is there,’ said Kamata, pointing to the next mountain.
It was about the same height, and also overgrown with forest, but it had one intriguing and distinctive feature. A section of the summit had split away from the massif (probably as a result of an earthquake) and twisted down, separated from the rest of the mountain by a deep crack. On the side facing them, the separated block ended in a precipice, where the slope had crumbled away, unable to retain the layer of earth on its inclined surface. It was a quite fantastic site: a crooked slice of mountain suspended over an abyss.
Erast Petrovich pressed his binoculars to his eyes. He could not make out any signs of human habitation at first, only the pine trees crowding close together and flocks of birds flying in zigzags. The only structure was clinging to the very edge of the precipice. Adjusting the focus with the little wheel, Fandorin saw a wooden house that was certainly of considerable size. It had something like a little bridge or jetty protruding from the wall that ran down into nowhere. But who could moor at that berth, at a height of two hundred sazhens?
‘Momochi Tamba,’ said Kamata in his distinctive English. ‘His house. The other houses can’t be seen from below.’
The titular counsellor felt his heart leap. O-Yumi was near! But how could he reach her?
He ran the binoculars over the entire mountain again, slowly.
‘I don’t understand how they g-get up there …’
‘That’s the wrong question,’ said the commander of the Black Jackets, looking at Erast Petrovich, not the mountain. His gaze was at once searching and mistrustful. ‘The right question is how do we get up there? I don’t know. Tsurumaki-dono said the gaijin will think of something. Think. I’ll wait.’
‘We have to move closer,’ said Fandorin.
They moved closer. To do that they had to climb to the peak of the split mountain – and then the separated block was very close. They didn’t walk, but crawled to the fissure that separated it off, trying not to show themselves above the grass, although on that side they couldn’t see a living soul.
The titular counsellor estimated the size of the crack. Deep, with a sheer verticalwall – impossible to scramble up. But not very wide. At the narrowest spot, where a dead, charred tree stuck up on the other side, it was hardly more than ten sazhens. The shinobi probably used a flying bridge or something of the sort to get across.
‘Well then?’ Kamata asked impatiently. ‘Can we get across there?’
‘No.’
The commander swore in a Japanese whisper, but the sense of his exclamation was clear enough: I knew a damned gaijin wouldn’t be any use to us.
‘We can’t get across there,’ Fandorin repeated, crawling away from the cliff edge. ‘But we can do something to make them come out.’
‘What?’
The vice-consul expounded his plan on the way back.
‘Secretly position men on the mountain, beside the crack. Wait for the wind to blow in that direction. We need a strong wind. But that’s not unusual in the mountains. Set fire to the forest. When the shinobi see that the flames could spread to their island, they’ll throw a bridge across and come to this side to put them out. First we’ll kill the ones who come running to put out the fire, then we’ll make our way into their village across their bridge.’
With numerous repetitions, checks and gesticulations, the explanation of the plan occupied the entire journey back to the camp.
It was already dark and the paths could not be seen, but Kamata walked confidently and didn’t go astray once.
When he had finally clarified the essential points of the proposed action, he pondered them for a long time.
He said:
‘A good plan. But not for shinobi. Shinobi are cunning. If the forest simply catches fire all of a sudden, they’ll suspect that something’s not right.’
‘Why just all of a sudden?’ asked Fandorin, pointing up at the sky, completely covered with black clouds. ‘The season of the plum rain. There are frequent thunderstorms. A lightning strike – a tre
e catches fire, the wind spreads the flames. Very simple.’
‘There will be a storm,’ the commander agreed. ‘But who knows when? How long will we wait? One day, two, a week?’
‘One day, two, a week,’ the titular counsellor said, and shrugged, thinking: And the longer the better. You and I, my friend, have different interests. I want to save O-Yumi, you want to kill the Stealthy Ones, and if she dies together with them, there’s no sorrow in that for you. I need time to prepare.
‘A good plan,’ Kamata repeated. ‘But no good for me. I won’t wait a week. I won’t even wait two days. I also have a plan. Better than the gaijin’s.’
‘I wonder what it is.’ The titular counsellor chuckled, certain that the old war-dog was bragging.
They heard muffled braying and the jingling of harness. It was the caravan moving up, after passing through the ravine under cover of darkness.
The Black Jackets quickly unloaded the bundles and crates off the mules. Wooden boards cracked and the barrels of Winchester rifles, still glossy with the factory grease, glinted in the light of dark lanterns.
‘About the forest fire – that’s good, that’s right,’ Kamata said in a satisfied voice as he watched four large crates being unloaded.
Their contents proved to be a Krupps mountain gun, two-and-a-half-inch calibre, the latest model – Erast Petrovich had seen guns like that among the trophies seized by the Turks during the recent war.
‘Shoot from the cannon. The pines will catch fire. The shinobi will run. Where to? I’ll put marksmen on the bottom of the crack. On the other side, where the precipice is, too. Let them climb down on ropes – we’ll shoot all of them.’
Kamata lovingly stroked the barrel of the gun.
Fandorin felt a chilly tremor run down his spine. Exactly what he was afraid of! It wouldn’t be a carefully planned operation to rescue a prisoner, but a bloodbath, in which there would be no survivors.
It was pointless trying to argue with the old bandit – he wouldn’t listen.
‘Perhaps your plan really is simpler,’ said the vice-consul, pretending to stifle a yawn. ‘When do we begin?’
‘An hour after dawn.’
‘Then we need to get a good night’s sleep. My servant and I will bed down by the stream. It’s a bit cooler there.’
Kamata mumbled something without turning round. He seemed to have lost all interest in the gaijin.
‘The dead tree, the dead tree’ – the words hammered away inside the titular counsellor’s head.
To be beautiful
After death is a great skill
That only trees have
1 ‘In ten years, Tokyo is nothing. Real power is the provinces. Real power is Mr Tsurumaki. Japan is not Tokyo. Japan is the provinces’ (distorted English)
THE GLOWING COALS
It was not difficult to get to the next mountain in the dark – Fandorin had memorised the way.
They clambered up to the top by guesswork – just keep going up and when there’s nowhere higher left to go, that’s the summit.
But determining the direction in which the split-away section of the mountain lay proved to be quite difficult.
Erast Petrovich and his servant tried going right and left, and once they almost fell over the edge of a cliff, and the cliff turned out not to be the one they needed – there was a river murmuring down at its bottom, but there was no river at the bottom of the crack.
Who can tell how much more time they would have wasted on the search, but fortunately the sky was gradually growing lighter: the dark clouds crept away to the east, the stars shone ever more brightly, and soon the moon came out. After the pitch darkness, it was as if a thousand-candle chandelier had lit up above the world – you could have read a book.
Kamata would have had to wait a long time for a thunderstorm, Erast Petrovich thought as he led Masa towards the fissure. Somewhere not far away an eagle owl hooted: not ‘wuhu, wuhu’ as in Russia, but ‘wufu, wufu’. That is its native accent, because there is no syllable ‘hu’ in the Japanese alphabet, thought Erast Petrovich.
There it was, the same place, with the charred pine on the far side, the one that the titular counsellor had noticed earlier. The dead tree was his only hope now.
‘Nawa,’1 the vice-consul whispered to his servant.
Masa unwound the long rope from his waist and handed it to him.
The art of lasso-throwing, a souvenir of his time in Turkish captivity, would come in handy yet again. Fandorin tied a wide noose and weighted it with a travelling kettle of stainless steel. He stood at the edge of the black abyss and started swinging the noose in wide, whistling circles above his head. The kettle struck the tree with a mournful clang and clattered across the stones. Missed!
He had to pull back the lasso, coil it up and throw again.
The loop caught on the trunk only at the fourth attempt.
The vice-consul wound the other end of the rope round a tree stump and checked to make sure it held. He set off towards the fissure, but Masa decisively shoved his master aside and went first.
He lay on his back, wrapped his short legs round the rope and set off, placing one hand in front of the other and crawling very quickly. The lasso swayed, the stump creaked, but the fearless Japanese didn’t stop for an instant. In five minutes he was already on the other side. He grabbed hold of the rope and pulled on it – so that Erast Petrovich would not sway as much. So the titular counsellor completed his journey through the blackness with every possible comfort, except that he skinned one hand slightly.
That was the first half of the job done. His watch showed three minutes after eleven.
‘Well, God speed,’ Fandorin said quietly, taking the Herstal out of its holster.
Masa pulled a short sword out from under his belt and checked to make sure that the blade slipped easily out of the scabbard.
Erast Petrovich had estimated that the hanging island was approximately a hundred sazhens across, from the fissure to the precipice. At a stroll, that was two minutes. But they walked slowly, so that no branch would crack and the fallen pines needles wouldn’t rustle. Occasionally they froze and listened. Nothing – no voices, no knocking, only the usual sounds of a forest at night.
The house loomed up out of the darkness unexpectedly. Erast Petrovich almost blundered into the planks of the wall, which were pressed right up against two pine trees. To look at, it was an ordinary peasant hut, like many that they had seen during their journey across the plain. Wooden lattices instead of windows, a thatched straw roof, a sliding door. Only one thing was strange – the area around the hut had not been cleared, the trees ran right up to it on all sides, and their branches met above its roof.
The house was absolutely still and silent, and Fandorin signalled to his servant – let’s move on.
After about fifty paces they came across a second house, also concealed in a thicket – one of the pine trees protruded straight out of the middle of the roof; probably it was used as a column. Not a sound or a glimmer of light here either.
Bewilderment and anxiety forced the titular counsellor to be doubly cautious. Before approaching Tamba’s house – the one hovering at the edge of the precipice – he had to know for certain what he was leaving behind him. So before they reached the precipice, they turned back.
They covered the entire island in zigzags. They found another house exactly like the first two. Nothing else.
And so the entire ‘fortress’ consisted of four wooden structures, and there was no garrison to be seen at all.
What if the shinobi had left their lair and O-Yumi wasn’t here? The idea made Fandorin feel genuinely afraid for the first time.
‘Iko!’2 he said to Masa, and set off, no longer weaving about, straight towards the grey emptiness that could be seen through the pines.
The house of Tamba the Eleventh was the only one surrounded by clear grassy space on three sides. On the fourth side, as Fandorin already knew, there was a gaping precipice.
&
nbsp; He could still hope that the inhabitants of this sinister village had gathered for a meeting at the house of their leader (Twigs had said he was called the jonin).
Pressing himself against a rough tree trunk, Erast Petrovich surveyed the building, which differed from the others only in its dimensions. There was nothing noteworthy about the residence of the leader of the Stealthy Ones. Fandorin felt something rather like disappointment. But the worst thing of all was that this house also seemed to be empty.
Had it really all been in vain?
The vice-consul darted across the open space and up the steps on to the narrow veranda that ran along the walls. Masa was right behind him every step of way.
Seeing his servant remove his footwear, Erast Petrovich followed his example – not out of Japanese politeness, but in order to make less noise.
The door was open slightly and Fandorin shone his little torch inside. He saw a long, unlit corridor covered with rice straw mats.
Masa wasted no time. He poured a few drops of oil from a little jug into the groove and the door slid back without creaking.
Yes, a corridor. Quite long. Seven sliding doors just like the first one: three on the left, three on the right and one at the end.
Removing the safety catch of his revolver, Erast Petrovich opened the first door on the right slowly and smoothly. Empty. No household items, just mats on the floor.
He opened the opposite door slightly more quickly. Again nothing. A bare room, with a transverse beam running across the far wall.
‘Damn!’ the titular counsellor muttered.
He moved on quickly, without any more precautions. He jerked open a door on the right and glanced in. A niche in the wall, some kind of scroll in it.
The second door on the left: a floor made of polished wooden boards, not covered with straw, otherwise nothing remarkable.
The third on the right: apparently a chapel for prayer – a Buddhist altar in the corner, statuettes of some kind, an unlit candle.
The third on the left: nothing, bare walls.
