David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘The first part of our ascent,’ Shuzai is saying, ‘we’ll make in six groups of two, leaving at five-minute intervals. First, Tsuru and Yagi; second, Kenka and Muguchi; third, Bara and Tanuki; next, Kuma and Ishi; then, Hane and Shakke; and last, Junrei,’ he looks at Uzaemon, ‘and me. We’ll regroup below the gatehouse’ – the men cluster around an inked map of the mountainside, their breaths mingling – ‘guarding this natural revile. I’ll lead Bara and Tanuki, Tsuru and Hane over this bluff and we’ll storm the gate from uphill – the unexpected direction – shortly after the change of guard. We’ll bind, gag and bag them with the ropes and sacks. They’re just farm boys, so don’t kill them, unless they insist. Bare Peak is another two hours’ stiff march, so the monks will be settling down for the night by the time we arrive. Kuma, Hane, Shakke, Ishi: scale the wall here…’ Shuzai now unfolds his picture of the Shrine ‘… on the south-west side, where the trees are closest and thickest. First, go to the gatehouse here and let the rest of us in. Then we send for the highest-ranking master. Him we inform that Sister Aibagawa is leaving with us. This will happen peacefully, or over a courtyard of slain acolytes. The choice is his.’ Shuzai looks at Uzaemon. ‘A threat you aren’t willing to carry through is no threat at all.’

Uzaemon nods, but Please, he prays, don’t let any life be lost…

‘Junrei’s face,’ Shuzai tells the others, ‘is known to Enomoto from the Shirandô Academy. Although our obliging landlord informed us that the Lord Abbot is in Miyako at present, Junrei mustn’t risk being identified, even second-hand. That is why you shall take no part in the raid.’

It is unacceptable, thinks Uzaemon, to cower outside like a woman.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ says Shuzai, ‘but you are not a killer.’

Uzaemon nods, intending to change Shuzai’s mind during the day.

‘When we leave, I’ll warn the monks that I’ll cut down any pursuers without mercy. We then withdraw, with the freed prisoner. We’ll cut the vines of Todoroki Bridge to win us more time tomorrow. We pass through the Halfway Gatehouse during the Hour of the Ox, descend the gorge and arrive back here by the Hour of the Rabbit. We carry the woman in the palanquin as far as Kashima. There we disperse and leave the domain before horsemen can be despatched. Any questions?’

Winter woods are creaking, knitted and knotted. Dead leaves lie in deep drifts. Needle-tips of birdsong stitch and thread the thicket’s many layers. Shuzai and Uzaemon climb in silence. Here the Mekura River is a bellowing, roiling, echoing thing. The granite sky entombs the valley.

By mid-morning, the arches of Uzaemon’s blistered feet are aching.

Here the Mekura River is as smooth and green as foreign glass.

Shuzai gives Uzaemon oil to rub into his aching calves and ankles, saying, ‘The swordsman’s first weapon is his feet.’

On a round rock, an immobile heron waits for fish.

‘The men you hired,’ ventures Uzaemon, ‘seem to trust you entirely.’

‘Some of us studied under the same master in Imabari; most of us served under a minor lordling of Iyo Domain who provoked some fierce skirmishes with his neighbour. To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.’

A splash punctures the jade pool: the heron is gone.

Uzaemon recalls an uncle teaching him long ago to skim stones. He recalls the old woman he saw at sunrise. ‘There are times when I suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be. This mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.’ He looks at his friend, who is watching a bird of prey high above them. ‘I am sounding like a drunken priest.’

‘Not at all,’ mumbles Shuzai, ‘Not at all.’

Higher up the mountainside, limestone cliffs wall in the gorge. Uzaemon begins to see parts of faces in the weather-worn escarpments. A bulge looks like a forehead, a protruding ridge a nose, and excoriations and rockslides, wrinkles and sags. Even mountains, thinks Uzaemon, were once young, and age, and one day die. One black rift under a shrub-hairy overhang could be a narrowed eye. He imagines ten thousand bats hanging from its ruckled roof…

… all waiting for one spring evening to ignite their small hearts.

The higher the altitude, the climber sees, the deeper life must hide from winter. Sap is sunk to roots; bears sleep; next year’s snakes are eggs.

My Nagasaki life, Uzaemon considers, is as gone as my childhood in Shikoku.

Uzaemon thinks of his adoptive parents and his wife conducting their affairs, intrigues and squabbles, but not guessing that they have lost their adopted son and husband. The process will take many months.

He touches the place over his midriff where he carries Orito’s letters.

Soon, Beloved, soon, he thinks. Just a few hours more…

By trying not to remember the Creeds of the Order, he remembers them.

His hand, he finds, is gripping his sword-hilt tight enough to blanch his knuckles.

He wonders whether Orito is already pregnant.

I will care for her, he swears, and raise the child as my own.

Silver birches shiver. Whatever she wishes is all that matters.

‘What was it like,’ Uzaemon asks a question he never asked Shuzai before ‘the first time you killed a man?’ Sycamore roots grip a steep bank. Shuzai leads for another ten, twenty, thirty paces, until the path arrives at a wide and lapping pool. Shuzai checks the steep, surrounding terrain, as if for ambushers…

… and cocks his head like a dog. He hears something Uzaemon does not.

The swordsman’s half-smile says, One of ours. ‘Killing depends on circumstances, as you’d expect, whether it’s a cold, planned murder, or a hot death in a fight, or inspired by honour or a more shameful motive. However many times you kill, though, it’s the first that matters. It’s a man’s first blood that banishes him from the world of the ordinary.’ Shuzai kneels at the water’s edge and drinks water from his cupped hands. A feathery fish hovers in the current; a bright berry floats by. ‘That reckless lordling of Iyo I told you about?’ Shuzai climbs on to a rock. ‘I was sixteen and sworn to serve the greedy dolt. The feud’s history is too long to explain here, but my role in it had me blundering through a thicket on the flank of Mount Ishizuchi one stewed night in the Sixth Month, separated from my comrades. The frogs’ racket smothered other sound and the darkness was blinding, and suddenly the ground gave way and I fell into an enemy foxhole. The scout was as unprepared as I was, and the foxhole so stuffed with our two bodies that neither of us could reach our swords. We fumbled and writhed but neither of us yelled for help. His hands found my throat, and clamped and squeezed, tight as Death. My mind was red and shrieking and my throat was crumpling and I thought, This is it… but Fate disagreed. Long ago, Fate had chosen for the enemy lord’s crest a crescent moon. This insignia was attached to my strangler’s helmet so poorly that it snapped off in my hand, so I could slip its sharp metal point through the slit of his eye-mask, through the softness behind it and side to side like a knife in a yam until his grip on my windpipe weakened and fell away.’

Uzaemon washes his hands and drinks some water from the pool.

‘Afterwards,’ says Shuzai, ‘in marketplaces, cities, crossroads, hamlets…’

The icy water strikes Uzaemon’s jawbone like a Dutch tuning fork.

‘… I thought, I am in this world, but no longer of this world.’

A wildcat paces along the bough of a fallen elm, bridging the path.

‘This lack of belonging, it marks us…’ Shuzai frowns ‘… around the eyes.’