David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

The Goddess’s stone nostrils cannot flare. Her baleful eyes cannot widen…

The candle is extinguished. Blackness swallows the cavern.

Back in the first of the altar rooms, Orito readies herself to pass through Master Genmu’s quarters when she notices the silken cords on the black robes and curses her previous stupidity. Ten of the cords, knotted together, form a light, strong rope as long as the outer wall is high: she attaches another five to make certain. Coiling this up, she slides open the door and skirts the edge of Master Genmu’s room to a side door. A screened passageway leads to an outer door and the Master’s Garden, where a bamboo ladder leans against the ramparts. She climbs up, ties one end of her rope around a sturdy, unobtrusive joist and throws the other from the parapet. Without a backward glance, she takes her last deep breath in captivity and lowers herself to the dry ditch…

Not safe yet. Orito scrambles into a lattice of winter boughs.

She keeps the Shrine wall on her right and refuses to think about Yayoi.

Big twins, she thinks, a fortnight late; a pelvis slimmer than Kawasemi’s…

Rounding the western corner, Orito cuts through a swathe of firs.

One in ten, one in twelve births in the House end with a dead woman.

Through stony ice and needle drifts she finds a sheltered bowl.

With your knowledge and skill, this is no vain boast, it would be one in thirty.

The wind’s quick sleeves catch on the thorny glassy trees.

‘If you turn back,’ Orito warns herself, ‘you know what the men will do.’

She finds the trail where the slope of torî gates begins. Their daylight cinnabar orange is black against the night sky.

Nobody can ask me to submit to enslavement, not even Yayoi…

Then Orito considers the weapon she acquired in the Scriptorium.

To doubt one New Year Letter, she could threaten Genmu, is to doubt them all…

Would the Sisters consent to the terms of the House if they weren’t sure their Gifts were alive and well in the World Below?

Morbid vengefulness, she would add, does not make for fruitful pregnancies.

The path turns a sharp corner. The constellation of the Hunter appears.

No. Orito dismisses the half-thought. I shall never go back.

She concentrates on the steep and icy path. An injury now could ruin her hopes of reaching Otane’s cottage by dawn. An eighth of an hour later Orito turns a high corner above the wood-and-vine bridge called Todoroki, and catches her breath. Mekura Gorge plunges down the mountainside, vast as the sky…

… A bell is ringing at the Shrine. It is not the deep time-bell, but a higher-pitched, insistent bell, rung in the House of Sisters when one of the women goes into labour. Orito imagines Yayoi calling her. She imagines the frantic disbelief prompted by her disappearance, the searches throughout the Precincts, and the discovery of her rope. She imagines Master Genmu being woken: The Newest Sister is gone…

She imagines knotted twin foetuses blocking the neck of Yayoi’s womb.

Clattering acolytes may be despatched down the path, the Halfway Gatehouse will be told of her disappearance, and the domain checkpoints at Isahaya and Kashima will be alerted tomorrow, but the Kyôga Mountains are an eternity of forest for fugitives to vanish into. You shall go back, Orito thinks, only if you choose to.

She imagines Master Suzaku, helpless, as Yayoi’s screams scald the air.

The bell could be a trick, she considers, to lure you back.

Far, far below, the Ariake Sea is burnished by the moonlight…

What may be a trick tonight will be the truth tomorrow night, or very soon…

‘The liberty of Aibagawa Orito,’ Orito speaks out loud, ‘is more important than the life of Yayoi and her twins.’ She examines the truth of the statement.

Afternoon of the Thirteenth Day of the First Month

‘I set out early,’ Shuzai reports. ‘At Jizo-sama’s statue at the marketplace I lit a three-sen candle to insure against mishap, and I soon had cause to be grateful for the precaution. Trouble found me by Ômagori Bridge. A captain in the Shogunal Guard on horseback blocked my path: he’d glimpsed my scabbard under my straw cape, and wanted to check that I had the rank to carry one. “Fortune never favours he who wears another’s clothes”, so I gave him my true name. Lucky it was I did. He dismounted, removed his own helmet and called me “Sensei”: I taught one of his sons when I first arrived in Nagasaki. We talked awhile, and I told him I was bound for Saga, for my old master’s seventh-year funeral ceremony. Servants wouldn’t be appropriate on such a pilgrimage, I claimed. The captain was embarrassed by this attempt to disguise my poverty, so he agreed, bade me good luck and rode on.’

Four students are practising their best kendo shrieks in the dojo.

Uzaemon feels a cold blossoming in his sore throat.

‘From Oyster Bay – a midden of fishermen’s hovels, shells and rotting rope – I turned north to Isahaya. Low, hilly land, as you know, and on a dismal First Month afternoon, the road is atrocious. By a crooked bend, four porters appeared from behind a shuttered-up tea-shack – a leerier pack of wild dogs you never saw. Each carried a hefty bludgeon in his scabby hand. They warned me that robbers would pounce upon a luckless, friendless, helpless traveller like myself, and urged me to hire them so I’d arrive at Isahaya unharmed. I drew my sword and assured them I was not as luckless, friendless or helpless as they believed. My gallant saviours melted away, and I reached Isahaya without further excitement. Here I avoided the bigger, more conspicuous inns, and took lodgings in the loft of a talkative tea-roaster’s. The only other guest was a pedlar of amulets and charms from holy places as far off as Ezo, so he claimed.’

Uzaemon catches his sneeze in a paper square, which he tosses onto the fire.

Shuzai hangs the kettle low over the flames. ‘I tapped my landlord for what he knew about Kyôga Domain. “Eighty square miles of mountain with not one town worthy of the name”, save for Kashima. The Lord Abbot takes a cut from the temples there, and harvests rice taxes from the coastal villages, but his real power flows from allies in Edo and Miyako. He feels secure enough to maintain just two divisions of guards: one to keep up appearances when his entourage travels and one barracked in Kashima to quell any local troubles. The amulet pedlar told me how he’d once tried to visit the shrine on Mount Shiranui. He’d spent several hours climbing up a steep ravine called Mekura Gorge, only to be turned back at a gatehouse halfway up. Three big village thugs, he complained, told him that Shiranui Shrine doesn’t trade in lucky charms. I put it to the pedlar that it’s a rare shrine that turns away paying pilgrims. The pedlar agreed, then told me this story from the reign of Kan’ei, when the harvests failed for three years all across Kyushu. Towns as far off as Hirado, Hakata and Nagasaki suffered starvation and riots. It was this famine, swore the pedlar, that led to rebellion in Shimabara and the humiliation of the Shogun’s first army. During the mayhem, a quiet samurai begged Shogun Ieyasu for the honour of leading, and financing, a battalion in the second attempt to crush the rebels. He fought so audaciously that after the last Christian head was hoisted on the last pike, a Shogunal decree obliged the disgraced Nabeshima clan of Hizen to cede the samurai not only a certain obscure shrine on Mount Shiranui but the entire mountainous region. Kyôga Domain was created by that decree, and the quiet samurai’s full title became Lord Abbot Kyôga-no-Enomoto-no-kami. The present Lord Abbot must be his…’ Shuzai calculates on his fingers ‘… his great-great-grandson, give or take a generation.’