Arturo Serrano - To Climates Unknown - An Alternate History of a World Without America

“You know the Lord Buddha teaches universal compassion too.”

“The Lord Buddha did not give his blood to save me.”

“Of course not. The Lord Buddha teaches that no one but you can save you. But I see that the god of the Spanish has got you fully convinced.” Tsunenaga nodded, having exhausted all his bravery in that confession. “Look, I still get news of what goes on in Edo. From what I hear, the Spanish religion doesn’t have a future in Japan.” He looked at his own hands, which a decade before had fought for independence and lost. “I am old, more a denizen of the next world than this. What little effort I could spare would be useless against your devotion. But Lord Masamune is still strong, and has a wider variety of tools.”

Tsunenaga couldn’t stop himself from shaking at the reminder of the increasing tendency to torture converts. “I must see him nonetheless. I must complete my work.”

Shō Nei leaned toward him, and in his expression Tsunenaga could see he was sincerely concerned. “As much as I dislike this new doctrine, it has a few good principles, which no one with a good heart will disagree with. One of them is that it is impossible to serve two masters.”

“I thank Your Majesty’s generous advice. But having seen Spain with my eyes, and having talked to the people who live and rule there, I am confident that they bear no ill will toward us.”

“Your capacity for self-deception is impressive. Let me clarify your situation for you: if you talk to your lord, your religion will suffer; if you don’t, your country will. Either you don’t recognize the danger, or you do and are too terrified to name it.” The king sighed, wishing he hadn’t revealed so much about the ways a human being could fail. “I know something about trying to avert an invasion. It is the kind of endeavor that can define a life. Believe me, you don’t want to give yourself reason to live in regret.”

An enigmatic smile appeared on Tsunenaga’s face. “I am moved by Your Majesty’s wish to save me. I would prefer, however, the humble joy of helping save Your Majesty.”

“I thought you wanted to ask a favor of me. You’ve been asking for a ship since you appeared.”

“Yes, and I still need it. But if I could, before leaving these islands, present to Your Majesty the good news of the Son of the Heavenly Lord, my mission would be even more complete.”

Shō Nei chuckled, feeling more pity than any real offense at the ambassador’s presumptuousness. “I am nearing death, but you arrived at the right time for me. You need not worry. I have listened to your good news. You have already saved me.”

Tsunenaga tried to find something to say, but was too surprised to form any coherent thought.

“That will be all. You will board the first ship departing from Shuri. You may leave me now.”

Japanese was not spoken aboard the ship, so Tsunenaga had no one to ask how many days it would take them to get to Sendai.

When they reached a town he didn’t recognize and they dragged him out of the ship without explanation, he had no one to ask where he’d landed.

His life did not end then and there, but he was going to spend the rest of it learning how simply, with the quiet wrath of a deathbed curse, the king of the Ryūkyūs had taken revenge on Japan.

Noon, September 23 (Gregorian), 1620

Yuegang

Making what his superiors would have judged too obvious an attempt at discretion, the waiter maintained no eye contact with Xiaobo as he brought her the plate of lamb skewers she’d ordered and tapped twice with his fingernail the bowl of dark tea she hadn’t. She closed her eyes, to refrain from chastising his clumsiness, and started eating the roasted meat. She kept a conscious count of the number of times she’d taken a bite and swallowed it before it would look natural for her to take the bowl in her hands, remove the lid, use it to push the leaves aside, and drink the tea. She was anxious to see the bottom of the bowl, but she had to avoid finishing it in one gulp, lest she drew the slightest curiosity. In her first assignments, closer to her hometown in the inner plains of China, a more carefree behavior would have been acceptable, but here, in a port city full of barbarians, she could afford no mistakes.

It didn’t escape her that her own people, not too many generations before, had counted as barbarians. It was primarily to make a point, which few understood anyway, that a Hui volunteered to serve in the protection of the Great Ming that had expelled her forebears’ conquerors.

After an extended display of relaxedness that was in truth an expenditure of her patience, she finally drank enough sips of the tea to read, upon raising the bowl to her face, the secret message painted at the bottom of it. It had just two words, “serious illness,” in a fast, almost careless calligraphy. She spat out some tea to cover the words and with a deliberate air of naturalness set the bowl back on the table. She ate the remaining pieces of lamb as she considered the implications. Hers was not a position from which she could do something meaningful about that news, but her training made her view unpreparedness as irresponsible.

Her mind hadn’t yet reached any conclusion by the time she paid for her meal and walked outside to check on her quarry. Earlier that day she’d been alerted to the arrival in town of a strange man who didn’t speak Chinese but had been drawing Chinese words in the dirt begging for food and assistance. By the description of his rich clothes she’d already inferred he must be Japanese, but the Japanese were not allowed to set foot in China, so his presence demanded an explanation. No one understood his pleading cries, and he had stayed at that same corner for hours, desperately redrawing the same words every time people walked over them. Her superiors had selected her to keep an eye on him because she had studied the barbarian languages. In a crowded port like Yuegang, it was impossible to do a job like hers without knowing Portuguese and Dutch at the very least, but she was also trained in Japanese, Ryūkyūan, Mongolian, Thai, Tibetan, and Persian. She felt she couldn’t do less than be equipped to deal with every conceivable enemy of China.

She turned the corner and saw, as she expected, the Japanese man still sitting on his spot. The words he had carved on the dirt were WISH HELP STOMACH VOID. She mentally retraced the Japanese sentence he must have been trying to compose, and felt a chill of empathy. From her inquiries during the morning she’d learned Ryūkyūan captains were under orders to not let him aboard their ships, which had to mean he was considered dangerous. His clothes marked him as a lord of some importance, but he’d been thrown ashore without his sword and, more obviously, without his retinue. If he was planning any action against China, he’d chosen an extremely ineffective way of going about it.

One street away she saw a group of men staring at her. They seemed to have noticed her interest in the stranger. Such attention would have been hard to avoid. She wore, not only for her assignments but in her daily life, the attire of a government eunuch, which she had chosen as a survival strategy to make a living, but also meant stealth was never an option. She made a snap calculation of risks and walked toward the stranger as swiftly as she could, which wasn’t much, and greeted him in Japanese. “I can get you food and shelter. You’re not safe out here.”

The man looked at her with sudden gratitude, and the painful slowness with which he stood up made her suspect he’d been hungry since before he’d reached the town. “I will be greatly in your debt, sir. I need to return to Japan with urgency.”

The corner of her eye perceived the approach of three men; in front of her, an alleyway led to one possible route to her safehouse. “We need to go.”