Autumn Bridge (10 page)

“Do you agree, Lord Genji?” Lord Saemon asked.

He could not admit he had heard nothing, since it would be highly insulting to Saemon and extremely embarrassing to himself. He pretended a need to hear a few more opinions before arriving at one of his own, and so managed to avoid both insult and embarrassment. Difficult though it was, for the rest of the meeting, he forced himself to think no more of Emily.

Saemon saw that Genji was distracted by other concerns but gave no indication that he had noticed. When the meeting was over, he thanked Genji for his insightful comments on the present crisis, apologized for his inability to control the impetuous Great Lord of Yoshino, and moved immediately to execute the decisions of the council with which he had been entrusted.

In the meantime, he kept his own counsel. After all, who else was there he could trust so fully, or whose judgment had been proved so sound as to be nearly prescient time after time? It was a lesson he had learned well from his father, the late Lord Kawakami, a most treacherous and deceitful man, who had commanded the most feared organ of the Shogun’s government, the secret police.

Trust no one around you, Lord Kawakami had said, no matter how well you think you know them.

Being the clever boy that he was at the time, he had replied, And what if I am alone? He expected his father to respond with a jest, but his seriousness never wavered.

Lord Kawakami had said, Then regard yourself with careful suspicion, question motives, examine associations, look for potential avenues of betrayal. If you find them before your enemies do, you can conceal them or, even better, bait them as traps, and you will have gained yet more advantages from what appear to others as weaknesses.

Saemon himself was a living trap. Kawakami had arranged matters so that everyone believed the son to hate the father. Being the eldest son, Saemon would normally expect to be Kawakami’s heir, and his eventual successor as Great Lord of Hino. It was a title without much substance, since Hino was one of the smallest and least important of Japan’s two hundred sixty domains, but being a Great Lord conferred important rewards of prestige and honor. This would not happen, since Saemon was said to be the child of a lesser concubine rather than Kawakami’s wife. He was raised in a small palace in the countryside, more of a glorified farmhouse than anything else, and received none of the pampering and privileges attained by his supposed half-brothers at the main castle. Naturally, such a son would hate his father.

Saemon, of course, was not the child of the concubine but what he was said not to be, namely, the eldest son of Kawakami’s wife. From his infancy, Saemon was part of a plan of deception. He grew up well known for the murderous feelings he harbored toward his father. Those feelings being perfectly appropriate, he gained entrée into various anti-Shogunate groups. It was all quite clever, perhaps even brilliant, in his father’s typical manner. The only flaw was that Saemon’s pretense of hatred attained a perfection Kawakami had not anticipated.

The son actually did hate the father. And the reasons for this, too, were perfectly natural.

Because of the devious long-range plot in which he involuntarily played so vital a role, Saemon had not been raised by his kindly, highborn, and loving mother in the castle of which he was the rightful heir. Instead, he was placed in the hands of a physically beautiful, lazy, sluttish concubine who had no interest in him whatsoever. To silence the bawling infant, she inflicted the most perverted sexual practices on him, which in his later view was what had ruined him for normal behavior forever. That he poisoned her with a very painful, slow-acting Chinese toxin when he was sixteen was hardly sufficient compensation, though from time to time, he still recalled with satisfaction how she took a full month to die, the month of the perfect autumn moon, and in that brief span aged twenty years. At the end, she had not a trace of her former beauty left, and what had been one of her most attractive characteristics, her intoxicating sexual fragrance, had degenerated into a stench so foul that only the lowliest servants ever entered her presence, and they infrequently.

From his father and stepmother, Saemon had learned that only he himself had his best interests at heart. Now, in a time of crisis upon crisis, great opportunities were arising for those with clarity of vision.

And who had clearer vision than one who was not burdened with false ideas of loyalty, honor, love, respect, sincerity, tradition, or family?

Lord Saemon was certain there was no one better suited to be that exemplary expression of the man of the future than he himself.

The time to act was not yet, but it was coming, and would arrive soon. Genji had saved him the trouble of killing his father. He would eventually kill Genji, as his father had planned, but not out of animosity. Genji was one of the Great Lords who could block his own ascent when the Tokugawa Shogun’s regime was finally toppled. It was a practical matter, no more.

With a view to the future — the real future, not one imagined by deluded weaklings — Saemon had begun investigating the numerous rumors that had swirled around Lord Genji from the moment of his birth. Most were the obvious stuff of fairy tales and peasant superstitions. Whenever disaster threatened, be it famine, war, plague, earthquake, or tidal wave, the desperate always sought refuge in magical intervention. They had nothing else. But two reports demanded Saemon’s more serious attention.

One attributed the mysterious slaughter of an isolated village of peasants in Hino Domain some six years ago to Lord Genji. Why would a nobleman of his exalted rank and high ambition sully his own hands with so minor an undertaking? No one knew.

The second concerned the departure of Lord Genji’s lover, Mayonaka no Heiko, a famous geisha in her time, to America in the same year. Some said she had run away with an American, Matthew Stark, then and now a close associate of Genji’s. But Saemon knew that a large quantity of Genji’s gold had gone to America with the two. That would have been impossible without his approval. Indeed, the very lives of the two could not have continued without it.

What was the truth?

Saemon was determined to find out.

The most unlikely event, the most insignificant person, could hold the key to Genji’s destruction.

It was the same ocean, yet nothing was the same. The shoreline of San Francisco Bay did not remind Heiko of Edo Bay, nor did the penetrating chill of this California autumn evoke memories of the milder coolness of the same season in Japan.

But the waves, in their constant movement, somehow took her thoughts back to that other place, and another time, when she had been the most beautiful geisha in the great capital city of the Tokugawa Shogun. It now seemed so very long ago, especially when she thought in terms of the Japanese calendar. The eleventh month in the fourteenth year of the Emperor Komei. The words and numbers bespoke a distant, barely remembered era.

Had it really been only two years ago when she had first met Genji?

She had misjudged him terribly, as had everyone. It was an easy mistake to make. Genji displayed none of the seriousness one expected of a high-ranking samurai in a time of crisis, and there was too often a smile on his lips, even when there was no reason anyone could discern for even the slightest amusement. He also dressed in a rather dandified manner. Such clothing was entirely appropriate for an actor, and no one could deny that the young lord was handsome enough for any Kabuki stage in the land, but he was not an actor, after all. He was a lord, heir to the rule of Akaoka Domain, and, if the persistent rumors were to be believed, endowed with prophetic vision. One would expect him to be more subdued in appearance, at the very least.

Her employer, Lord Kawakami, the head of the Shogun’s secret police, had described Genji as a spoiled and shallow dilettante, a wastrel interested in women and wine, and not at all in the martial traditions of the samurai. Her observations had seemed to confirm this. But once she had permitted herself to be seduced by him, she knew that Kawakami was terribly mistaken. Genji had the manner of a weakling, and dressed like one, but his body betrayed his secret. His apparent softness, when clothed, was the result of a posture of feigned laxness. Disciplined muscles and sinews knit his bones together in taut potentiality, much as the string of a bow drew an otherwise harmless curve of wood into a deadly weapon. Heiko, whose own martial training gave her an intimate knowledge of human musculature, knew from the first time they had made love that Genji had spent years training with warhorse, sword, dagger, spear, and bow and arrows. That someone as well informed as Sticky Eye Kawakami did not know this suggested a degree of secret training that led to only one conclusion; Genji’s outward behavior had been intended to lead observers to the faulty conclusion that Kawakami had in fact reached.

Heiko had not reported this to Kawakami. She told herself it wasn’t really valuable information. Did it mean that Genji’s clan, the Okumichi, plotted treason against the Shogun? Of course, that was a given. Enmity between the Shogun’s clan and those of its opponents had lasted nearly three hundred years. That those three hundred years had been three hundred years of peace mattered not at all. The plotting and counterplotting would not end until one side finally triumphed conclusively over the other. Since wars among the clans were almost never truly conclusive, it was entirely likely that the plotting and counterplotting would continue until the sun itself fell from the sky. So she had not yet really learned anything worth reporting. So she told herself. And by the time she knew the truth, she was no longer Kawakami’s tool, but Genji’s lover.

It seemed so long ago now. Perhaps because these months in America had been the longest months of her life. The certainty that she would soon be recalled home by Genji somehow made time pass that much more slowly.

“Heiko.” Matthew Stark’s gentle voice was close behind her. She had not heard him approach. Memories had dulled her sense of the present. “Fog’s likely to drift in from the sea soon. We should be heading home.”

“Yes, thank you, Matthew.” Heiko took his offered arm and leaned heavily on him as they negotiated their way up the pathway back toward the road. The hill seemed much steeper now than it had when she was going down.

“I wish you wouldn’t exert yourself so much,” Stark said. “Dr. Winslow told me women in your condition should spend these last weeks in bed.”

The foolishness of such a notion made Heiko feel like laughing, but she restrained herself. Though the outsiders may know much about science, their knowledge of the simplest facts of nature was often ridiculously weak. “Four weeks in bed would weaken, not strengthen, and I will need strength when the time comes.”

Stark said, “Sometimes you sound more like a samurai than a woman.”

She smiled as he helped her into the carriage. “I take that as a compliment, Matthew. Thank you.”

“I didn’t mean it as one.” But he returned her smile before he snapped the reins to urge the horse forward.

Heiko told herself to stop thinking of Stark and the other Americans as outsiders. This was their country. Here, she was the outsider. But she would not be here much longer. Her gaze softened. She drowsed. She was asleep and dreaming of Cloud of Sparrows Castle long before they reached San Francisco.

Lady Shizuka was sixteen years old when Lord Hironobu rescued her and brought her to Cloud of Sparrows Castle as his bride. As soon as she arrived, she found her way without a single misstep through oddly angled corridors to the innermost courtyard, greatly surprising Lord Hironobu. All interior passages of the castle were intentionally confusing, to thwart any attackers who might succeed in breaching the outer defenses during a siege.

“How did you know how to get here?”

But once inside, she stood in confusion. “Where are they?”

“Where are what?”

“The flowers,” Shizuka said.

“Flowers?” Hironobu laughed. “There is no place for flowers here. This is a bastion of fearsome warriors. Look, here comes one now. Go, meet my new wife. Shizuka, this is my bodyguard, Go.”

Go, a large, grim-visaged man, said nothing to her, and made no gesture of greeting. He said to Hironobu, “You should not have done this, my lord.”

“You are too serious. This is a matter of love, not war or politics. Stop worrying.” Hironobu said to Shizuka, “He was my warrior nursemaid when I was a child. It seems sometimes he thinks he still is.”

But Shizuka was not interested in Go. She went to the center of the courtyard. “They should be here, right here.”

“What should be right here?” Hironobu said.

“The flowers,” Shizuka said. “American Beauty roses.”

“What kind of roses?”

“American Beauty roses.”

“American? What is American?”

Shizuka shrugged impatiently. “Where is Lord Narihira? He must have planted them in the wrong place.”

Hironobu’s expression was now a seriously worried one. “Who is Lord Narihira?”

“The lord of this castle,” Shizuka said.

“Shizuka, I am the lord of this castle,” Hironobu said.

When she remembered this incident years later, she would reflect with some amusement on those days before she realized how different her knowledge was from that of others. But now her disappointment was too keen to bear. She had so been looking forward to seeing those splendid blossoms of red, pink, and white. Tears rolled helplessly down her cheeks.

When Hironobu tried to comfort her, all she could say was “I wouldn’t have cut it from its branch. I just wanted to see it. An American Beauty rose.”

“You believe knowing the future and knowing the past are opposite.”
The lord of the domain said, “I do.”
“In fact, they amount to the same thing.”
The lord said, “Nonsense. The past is done. The future is yet to come. How can the two be the same?”
“Knowing the past, can you change it?”
“Of course not,” the lord said.
“And how is knowing the inevitable any different from knowing what has already happened?”
AKI-NO-HASHI
(1311)