David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘Enomoto would have you beheaded for casting a slur on his reputation.’

This minute, Uzaemon thinks, is a crossroads. ‘Shuzai, if I had persuaded my father to let me marry Miss Aibagawa, as I once promised, she wouldn’t be enslaved in this…’ he jabs at the parchment ‘… farm. Do you understand why I have to free her?’

‘What I understand is that if you act alone you’ll get sliced like a tuna fish. Give me a few days. I may take a short journey.’

The Eighth Night of the First Month in the Twelfth Year of the Era of Kansei

Orito considers the luck required in the hours ahead: the cat’s tunnel must be wide enough to admit a slim woman and not barred at its exit; Yayoi must sleep until morning without checking on her; she must descend an ice-bound gorge without injury, and pass the Halfway Gate without alerting the guards; and by dawn, she must find Otane’s house and trust her friend to give her sanctuary. All of which, Orito thinks, is just the beginning. Returning to Nagasaki would mean recapture, but escape to the relative safety of Chikugo Domain, or Kumamoto or Kagoshima, would mean arriving in a strange town as a homeless, friendless woman without a sen to her name.

Engiftment is next week, Orito thinks. Next week is your turn.

Inch by cautious inch, Orito slides open her door.

My first footstep, she thinks, as a fugitive, and passes Yayoi’s room.

Her heavily pregnant friend is snoring. Orito whispers, ‘I am sorry.’

For Yayoi, Orito’s escape will be a brutal abandonment.

It’s the Goddess, the midwife reminds herself, who forces you to do this.

Orito slides her feet around the passageway to the Kitchen where a screen serves as the curfew exit out on to the Cloisters. Here she binds a pair of straw-and-canvas shoes on to her feet.

Outside, icy air soaks into her padded jacket and mountain trousers.

A gibbous moon is grubby. Stars are bubbles, trapped in ice. The old pine is gnarled and malign. Orito navigates the Cloisters back to the place the cat showed her a few weeks ago. Watching the shadows, she lowers herself on to the frost-fused stones. She ducks underneath the walkway, bracing herself for a shout of alarm…

… but there is no shout. Orito crawls under the inner passageway until her groping hand finds the rectangle between the foundation stones. She found it once again after the moon-grey cat showed it to her, but in doing so earned the attention of Sisters Asagao and Sawarabi, and had to concoct a dubious story about a dropped pin. In the nine days since, she has not risked reconnoitring the tunnel. If, she thinks, it is a tunnel, and not just a few missing blocks in the foundations. Head first, she inserts herself through the black rectangle and crawls forward.

Inside, the ‘roof’ is knee-height, the walls a forearm apart. To move, Orito must wriggle laterally, like an eel, less elegantly but as quietly. Soon her kneecaps are scraped, her shins are bruised and her fingertips hurt as they grapple for traction on the frozen stones. The floor feels smoothed, as if by running water. The darkness is one degree short of absolute. When her probing knuckles slap a stone block, she despairs, thinking she is come to a dead end… but then the conduit bends to the left. Twisting her body around the sharp corner, she pushes onward. She shivers uncontrollably and her lungs hurt. She tries not to think of giant rats or entombment. I must be under Umegae’s room, she supposes, imagining the Sister pressed against Hashihime, just two layers of floorboard, a tatami mat and an under-futon above her.

Is the darkness ahead, she wonders, growing less dark?

Hope pushes her onwards. She makes out another corner.

Rounding it, Orito sees a small triangle of moonlit stone.

A hole in the House’s outer wall, she realises. Please, please let it be big enough.

But after a minute’s slow struggle, she finds the hole little bigger than a fist: just the right size for a cat. Years of ice and sun, she guesses, loosened a single lump of stone. Were the hole any larger, she thinks, it would have been noticed from the outside. Anchoring herself, she places her hand against the stone adjacent to the hole and pushes with all her strength until a painful crick in her bent neck obliges her to stop.

Some objects are potentially movable, she thinks, but this one, never.

‘That’s it then.’ Her murmured breath is white. ‘There’s no escape.’

Orito considers the next twenty years, the men, and the children removed.

She retreats to the second bend, turns around with difficulty and propels herself forwards, feet first, back to the outer wall and wedges herself tight: she plants her heels on the adjacent stone and pushes…

I may as well, Orito gasps for breath, try to shift Bare Peak.

Then she imagines Abbess Izu, announcing her Engiftment.

Jack-knifing herself, she kicks at the stone with the flat of her feet.

She imagines the Sisters’ congratulations: gleeful, spiteful and sincere.

Barking her shins, she kicks at the stone again, again and again…

She thinks of Master Genmu pawing and gnawing her.

What was that sound? Orito stops. Was that a grating sound?

She imagines Suzaku pulling out her first baby; her third; her ninth…

Her feet kick the stone until her calves hurt and her neck throbs.

Grit trickles on to her ankles – and suddenly not one but two blocks tumble away and her feet are sticking out into empty space.

She hears stones thump down a low slope, and settle with a thud.

The snow is scabby and ruckled underfoot. Orientate yourself, Orito is dazed to be outside the House, and quickly. The long gully between the ramped foundations of the House of Sisters and the Shrine’s outer wall is five paces wide, but the wall is high as three men: to reach its ramparts, she must find the stairs or a ladder. Left, towards the northern corner is a Moon Gate in the Chinese style: this, Orito has learnt from Yayoi, leads into a triangular courtyard and Master Genmu’s fine quarters. Orito hurries in the opposite direction towards the eastern corner. Passing the end of the House of Sisters, she enters a small enclosure accommodating the hen-coop, dovecote and stalls for the goats. The birds stir slightly as she passes, but the goats stay asleep.

The eastern corner is connected by a roofed walkway to the Masters’ Hall; by a small storehouse, a bamboo ladder is propped against the outer wall. Daring to hope that escape is just a few moments away, Orito climbs up to the rampart. Level with the Shrine’s eaves, she sees the ancient Column of Amanohashira, rising from the Sacred Coutyard. Its spike impales the moon. Such arresting beauty, Orito thinks. Such silent violence.

She pulls up the bamboo ladder and lowers it over the wall’s outer face…

The dense pine forest comes to within twenty paces of the Shrine.

… but the ladder’s feet don’t reach the ground. Perhaps there is a dry moat.

The thick shadow below the wall makes it impossible to guess at the drop.

If I jump and break my leg, she thinks, I’ll freeze to death by sunrise.

Her numb fingers lose their grip and the ladder falls and shatters.

I need a rope, she concludes, or the means to fashion one…

Feeling as exposed as a rat on a shelf, Orito hurries along the rampart towards the Great Gate in the southern corner, hoping that freedom can be won over the body of a soundly sleeping sentry. She climbs down the next ladder to a gully between the outer wall and the barn-sized Kitchen and Dining Hall. There is the smell of latrines and soot. Amber light leaks from the Kitchen door. Knives are being sharpened by an insomniac cook. To disguise her footfalls, Orito steps in time to the metallic scrape. The next Moon Gate leads her into the Southern Courtyard, overlooked by the Meditation Hall and populated by two giant cryptomeria: Fûjin, the Wind God, bent under his sack of the world’s winds; and Raijin, the Thunder God, who steals navels during thunderstorms, holding up his chain of hand-drums. The Great Gate, like Dejima’s Land-Gate, consists of tall double-doors for palanquins, and a smaller door through the gatehouse. This door, Orito sees, stands slightly ajar…