Earth-Thunder

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘That, sire, must remain a secret – for reasons I am sure you understand.’

  Aishi Sakimoto could hardly contain his excitement at the prospect of toppling the Toh-Yota family. ‘If you succeed, you will both be richly rewarded.’

  Cadillac bowed again. ‘We seek no reward, sire, other than a firm and continuing friendship between our two nations. But even though we are able to call upon powerful magic we need your help and guidance to gain access to the Lady Mishiko. Will you furnish us with the men, ships and resources we require?’

  Sakimoto did not hesitate. ‘You shall have them.’

  Chapter Six

  The large fortified residence known as the Winter Palace was situated at Showa, ten miles inland from the port of Oshana-sita, and some four miles south of the state line between Delaware and Maryland. The whole of the peninsular from Wilmington across to the neck of Delaware bay and down to the southern tip with its garland of islands which had been part of Virginia, belonged to the Toh-Yota. During their eighty-year reign, the family had built or taken over five similar strongholds on the mainland, but since his accession, the Shogun had chosen to spend the winter months at Showa – hence its name.

  It was towards the Winter Palace that Lord Kiyomori Min-Orota led his mounted and wheeled entourage, after journeying in three boats, along canal, river and coastline from Sara-kusa to a small backwater port some fifteen miles north of Oshana-sita.

  At the head of the slower-moving baggage-train was a closed carriage-box containing Cadillac and Roz, masked and cloaked in the style of travelling courtesans. This disguise had been proposed by Cadillac, who had already made one successful trip across Ne-Issan posing as a high-priced lady from the ‘floating world’.

  Following the baggage-train at irregular intervals and in three unevenly-sized groups were samurai horsemen supplied by Aishi Sakimoto. These were also travelling in disguise. The two largest appeared to be road-convoys of merchants and cart-drivers carrying goods from Firi, the other a group of horse-traders with several promising-looking mounts in tow and papers which identified them as coming from the domain of Toh-Shiba family. In a further attempt to conceal the fact that they formed one coherent group, Lord Min-Orota’s party was separated from the rearmost road-convoy by some four hours, and they were all travelling via different routes to their alloted positions around the Winter Palace.

  Aishi Sakimoto, the acting head of the Yama-Shita family, had chosen Lord Min-Orota to make contact with Lady Mishiko because of his face-saving leap into the Shogun’s camp following the death of his co-conspirator, Domain-Lord Hirohito Yama-Shita.

  Kiyo Min-Orota was widely regarded as someone not to be wholly trusted by either side. Inviting him to the meeting had been a gamble but it had paid off. Kiyo, despite his opportunism, was committed to the Progressive movement, and the task he had now been given fitted exactly with people’s expectations of him.

  Sakimoto knew that Ieyasu – who had learned of the meeting at Sara-kusa – would be expecting to hear from Lord Min-Orota. He would not be disappointed. Kiyo was on his way to tell Ieyasu that the Yama-Shita had uncovered damning proof that he had – with the help of the Federation – deployed a network of agents equipped with communication devices powered by the Dark Light: proof in the form of documents, equipment and two captured long-dog agents disguised as Mute slaves.

  As a stalwart ally, Kiyo would say he had brought this news out of concern for the damage it would do to the Shogun and the Toh-Yota family once the accusation, and the attendant rumours, began to be spread by their enemies throughout Ne-Issan.

  Min-Orota himself was convinced Ieyasu would do his level best to contain this dismaying news instead of passing it on to the Shogun. Indeed, as he had argued at Sara-kusa, when everything was taken into account, it was obvious that Yoritomo did not know what Ieyasu had been up to. Keeping it secret over the past years had enabled Ieyasu to reinforce his position as the man who knew everything, and that in turn had helped him discredit the newly-created College of Heralds – forcing Yoritomo back into a position of total dependence upon him.

  But there were two things Min-Orota, the loyal and trusted friend, did not intend to reveal. First was that, besides briefing the Court Chamberlain, he also planned to spill the entire can of beans to the Lady Mishiko who, because of her animosity towards Ieyasu for his past interference in her life, would be only too pleased to tell her brother the good news. And second, was that the conspirators planned to use a deadly mixture of fact, fiction and Mute magic to poison Lady Mishiko’s mind and turn her into an assassin.…

  Lady Mishiko, at this point in time, knew nothing of this. Since the welcome death of her husband and the untimely demise of her lover Toshiro Hase-Gawa, she had become a semi-recluse living in her brother’s household, while she tried to put the pieces of her shattered life back together.

  With her three children and her small personal retinue of servants, she had her own permanent apartments in all the princely households, and followed her brother in his seasonal moves around his four domains. Mishiko was the only close relative so favoured; her three elder sisters, all married, as she had been, into noble houses closely allied with the Toh-Yota, were only seen at court on great state occasions such as the annual ceremony each spring when the domain-lords of Ne-Issan gathered in all their martial splendour to renew their oath of fealty to the Shogun.

  But as the Inner Court gossips knew, Mishiko’s sisters had not become one of the permanent focal points of their younger brother’s warped desires. Each of them, before being married off, had been bullied or cajoled into submitting to varying degrees of physical intimacy and responding in kind, but for one reason or another his interest in them had slackened then disappeared entirely (to their great relief) as Mishiko began to blossom into womanhood.

  Most noblewomen had small bosoms, some had almost flat chests like men, and this had become the accepted fashion. The traditional upper-class Japanese style of dress was not designed to display the female bosom, and any woman whose chest measurements exceeded the norm took care to conceal her abundance under a binding cloth.

  On reaching puberty, Mishiko’s breasts had budded quickly and to her dismay had continued to grow full and firm, surmounted with generous nipples. Tormented by her slim-breasted sisters, she was haunted by visions of being weighed down by two overripe melons like her moon-faced Korean wet-nurse, but to her great relief this hadn’t happened.

  By her sixteenth birthday – the age when noble families started thinking about suitable marriage partners – Mishiko was left generously endowed but not grossly overburdened. But by that time, she was no longer a virgin. Yoritomo, gripped by the feverish fantasies that plague young men as the sap begins to rise, had already forced himself upon her.

  Having shared the bathtub with Mishiko and his other sisters from early childhood to the age of puberty, Yoritomo had seen her breasts begin to bud. From that moment on, using a great deal of ingenuity, he had contrived to spy upon her nakedness. The vision of her swelling body and the desire to fondle it – as she herself did in her most private moments – became an obsession. It was, as he confessed to her later, like a worm in the brain – eating away at his sanity.

  Given the dissolute atmosphere that permeated the Inner Court during his father’s reign, it was hardly surprising that Yoritomo’s incestuous desires were able to flourish unnoticed and unchecked. As the heir to the throne, the courtiers who served his father treated him with the utmost deference, and his sisters were also obliged to humour him for fear of what might happen to them when he became the Shogun.

  It took some while for Yoritomo to realise this but when he did, and finally summoned up the courage to turn his youthful fantasies into reality, he began the fumbling sexual conquest of his sisters. One by one, singly and in pairs, with increasing proficiency, the secret liaisons continued until the magic moment when Mishiko came of age.

  Like her sisters before her, Mishiko had submitted because she da
red not do otherwise. The actual physical relationship had ended six years ago with her marriage to Consul-General Nakane Toh-Shiba. She had never spoken of it – not even to the Herald – and no one had ever alluded to it in her presence, but by the very nature of life at court, the affair had not remained a secret for very long.

  With her return as a widow to her brother’s household, Mishiko had nervously awaited the summons to Yoritomo’s bed-chamber, but to her great relief it had not come. Having lost an unloved husband and a lover who embodied everything she desired in the space of a few weeks, she was an emotional wreck. She had nurtured the dream that one day she might be free to marry the Herald, and with the death of Nakane at the Heron Pool that day had come. For one delirious moment her whole life had been transformed and then, just as quickly, the dream – which her children had shared – had been brutally crushed.

  In the three years during which the secret romance had blossomed, Mishiko had learned to conceal her true feelings, but to have been forced, so soon after the event, to give her body to the man who had sent the Herald to his death would have stripped away the last shreds of self-respect and destroyed her reason.

  Fortunately, her fears proved groundless. It was clear from the way her brother looked at her in the brief moments of relative privacy that life at court afforded them, that his youthful desires for her had been rekindled, but the message in his eyes was not matched by word or deed, and was contradicted by a certain coldness in his manner.

  Instead of gratefully accepting that she was no longer the subject of his unwanted attentions, Mishiko began to wonder why this should be so and came up with two possible reasons for Yoritomo’s detachment: he either regarded her as shop-soiled goods because of her illicit physical relationship with the Herald, or he was trying to suppress his own secret desires in order to live up to the incorruptible image he had created for his role as Shogun, Ruler of the Seventeen Domains of Ne-Issan. Or both.

  And with inexplicable perverseness, even though the emotional scars would never heal, Mishiko started to return his smouldering glances but made no other overt sign or gesture. While earning his forgiveness, she too would play the detached temptress. And with patient guile she would lure this saintly prince who had so ill-used her down from his lofty pedestal.

  And destroy him.…

  Lord Kiyomori Min-Orota was about to give a fresh impetus to this desire for revenge. His questionable loyalty was not the only reason he had been chosen as the go-between. He knew Lady Mishiko much better than the other progressive domain-lords. Her husband, Nakane Toh-Shiba, had served as the Shogun’s Consul-General to Masa-chusa and Ro-diren – Lord Min-Orota’s domain.

  For the past nine years, the couple had occupied the official government residence not far from his own fortified palace near Bo-sona, and as the Shogun’s senior representative to the Min-Orota court, Toh-Shiba had been a frequent visitor. On most formal occasions, Lady Mishiko had accompanied her husband and Min-Orota had gone out of his way to maintain a cordial relationship. As the Shogun’s nearest and dearest sister, Mishiko carried considerable clout. A favourable word from her on behalf of a petitioner often led to a happy result as, for example, in the three-yearly distribution of trading licences.

  Lord Min-Orota had also played the role of a concerned friend and father-figure, being amongst the first to offer his condolences on the death of the Consul-General – a death he had witnessed and which, despite the surrounding terror, had caused him a great deal of quiet satisfaction. The Consul-General had been a dissolute pig who had behaved disgracefully towards his wife and family. Everyone had known what she was in for when the match was announced, but it had been a politically-sensitive marriage; another coup engineered by that old fox Ieyasu.

  Mishiko had dutifully played the role of the heartbroken wife but she was well rid of him, and Min-Orota – knowing through his own informers of her liaison with the Herald, Toshiro Hase-Gawa, had expressed the hope that after a suitable period of mourning, she might find happiness elsewhere.

  At the time, the source of that happiness had been standing by her shoulder. When he met their eyes, Min-Orota had been careful to give no sign that he knew what was going on, and the two lovers had given nothing away either. But it was not to be. Mishiko had suffered a doubly cruel blow, and since no one was supposed to know of the relationship, Min-Orota could not openly do or say anything to allay her sense of loss. This time the grief was genuine, and even more unbearable because it could not be shared with anyone.

  As a domain-lord with one foot in the Progressive camp, he was secretly relieved to be rid of the Herald. Besides being a highly efficient diplomatic messenger, Toshiro Hase-Gawa had been far too good at his real job – nosing into other people’s business. On the other hand, as a father with two daughters of his own trapped in arranged marriages, he could understand what she was going through. When it was safe to do so, he had taken the opportunity to privately express his sympathy over the loss of ‘a loyal servant and friend’ – someone, he knew, her children would miss greatly.

  The veiled phrases he used left Mishiko in no doubt that he knew the score, and that if she needed someone to talk to, or a shoulder to cry on, his was available. It was a good move. Mishiko had responded warmly and it had left him better placed than before. As well it might, for under the terms of his settlement with the Shogun after the Heron Pool disaster, he had been landed with paying a huge sum in compensation for her husband’s death.

  The fine had been levied on the tenuous grounds that the Consul-General’s death was due to ‘administrative negligence’, i.e. it had occurred in his domain, aboard a flying-horse constructed in workshops financed by him and under his jurisdiction. Faced with a range of unpleasant alternatives, it had been an offer he couldn’t refuse. Min-Orota was still stumping up the cash in instalments, and the pain of parting with such large amounts of money was not eased by a growing certainty that Nakane Toh-Shiba’s death had been engineered by the Shogun himself.

  It was an example of the uses and abuses of power – and it had always been thus. That was why there were always people – like the Yama-Shita – waiting in the wings, ready to gamble everything in a bid to seize control of Ne-Issan and increase their share of its riches. The trick for middle-ranking players like Kiyo Min-Orota, was to hold the balance for as long as possible before committing yourself to what you hoped was the winning side. That was the good thing about this present move. If the monkey-witches’ plan to use Lady Mishiko to kill Ieyasu and Yoritomo succeeded, then the whole country was up for grabs. If it didn’t, he would be on record as a loyal ally who had alerted the Shogun to the potentially damaging information uncovered by the Yama-Shita. Whichever way it went, he couldn’t lose.

  Since the Yama-Shita and its Progressive allies were not supposed to know that Lord Min-Orota was heading south to reveal their plans, it provided him with a reason for making a stealthy approach to the Winter Palace. And delivering another hefty instalment into Mishiko’s pension fund gave Min-Orota a perfectly reasonable pretext for meeting the lady face-to-face.

  Heading south from the back-water port of Mira-bara, Min-Orota and his entourage came to Be-isha, a well-appointed post-house inn some three miles north of the Winter Palace. Scattering chickens, pigs and peasants in all directions, Min-Orota rode into the courtyard with his fifty-strong mounted retinue and despatched his principal aide to arrange suitable accommodation for themselves, plus the drivers and domestics accompanying the baggage-train which was still a mile back down the road.

  The aide returned with the post-house keeper and his wife in tow. After the habitual orgy of bowing and apologising for their total unworthiness, the palm-rubbing proprietor explained that the rentable accommodation was almost fully booked. Only one pavilion – the most expensive – remained. This might suit the noble lord, but there was no place for his mounted retinue, or the drivers and porters who had yet to arrive.

  The post-house keeper did not need to explain why,
and Min-Orota cursed himself for not remembering that business was always brisk at this time of year. Whenever the Shogun took up residence in the Winter Palace, the permanent staff was overwhelmed by dozens of court officials, government administrators, various relatives of Yoritomo, friends and hangers-on – all with their own staffs and servants – plus a regiment of cavalry and foot-soldiers, drafted in to reinforce the palace guard.

  This seasonal influx brought enticing amounts of disposable cash into the area. In off-duty hours, far away from home, government functionaries and soldiers of all ranks were always in need of entertainment and their arrival was welcomed by a small army of itinerant pedlars, jugglers, acrobats, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers and shysters who came flooding in from the back-streets of Awashi-tana and Bati-moro to set up shop around the palace.

  Lord Min-Orota’s solution to the problem was simple. Announcing that he required the exclusive use of the entire post-house for himself and his staff over the next three days, he offered triple the going rate. And when the startled proprietor accepted, he tossed him a bag of gold coins and gave him two hours to clear out the riff-raff and make the place presentable.

  Satisfied he had resolved the situation, Kiyo called upon his personal bodyguard to follow him, wheeled his horse around and rode off towards the Winter Palace preceded by two aides, each bearing aloft the blue and brown house-flag of the Min-Orota family.

  After presenting his credentials to the Captain of the Outer Keep, Min-Orota followed the flag-bearers across the moat bridge into the walled centre courtyard of the Winter Palace. Soldiers – mostly bowmen – were ranged around the battlements. Anyone who forced their way through the main doors uninvited would find it hard to break out of this killing zone. The sloping walls offered no hiding place. There were several exits, each one secured by iron-studded doors. They were tall enough to admit fully-armed horsemen, but to force an entry under fire would require the hasty application of explosives. Or traitors on the other side.