There was a hanging moment of silence. All Thaniel could hear was his own heart and the awkward catch in his lungs. He’d never been shocked from taking a hit before, not once, or afraid, and certainly never from anything that hadn’t even hurt. But he’d never come up against anyone who could have killed him without trying. Mori almost had. It hadn’t been a considered lashing out; it had been panic. If he’d punched Thaniel in the throat, he would have broken his neck.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mori said softly. He was holding his hands up, absolutely still.
Thaniel shook his head once. He wanted to vanish. He hadn’t listened properly, before; he hadn’t bothered to imagine what it must be like for Mori to remember someone wasting and weakening, fading into nothing but sickness and then, at last, like a mercy, the shrouds and the finality of a graveyard; the house finally without anyone coughing or dying in it, waking without worrying about looking after the wreck of another human, airing away that rank chemical smell of antiseptic medicine, settling down with a brilliant, laughing wife – only to jolt back to the present and find it was all ahead and that person, that thing, was leaning up close.
‘No, I’ll go. I’ll go. I’m sorry.’
Mori was quiet at first. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Christ, it’s not your fault. I’ll get on in the morning. And then …’ He had to fight hard for something that sounded almost natural but non-binding. ‘I’ll see you when I see you.’
‘Thaniel … I’ve never been more ashamed of anything than this.’
‘All right, calm down. It’s not the end of the world, is it.’ It came out rougher than he meant, but that was worlds better than weeping.
Mori tilted his eyes down. ‘Right. Well; night.’
‘Mm.’ Thaniel waited for a few minutes after Mori had gone, crushing his fingernails into his palms, then cried until he could think again.
He was surprised when, as he was putting his things together the next morning, Six announced that she was coming to the legation too. When he asked if she was sure, she nodded and said that the generator here was very unreliable.
‘We’re not going to see much of Mori,’ he said. It was a shock to hear it aloud and he had to scrabble for a lie. ‘It’s too far to come to and fro, and the train’s too expensive.’
‘Mori’s optional,’ she said.
He pulled her close. She didn’t like it and squirmed away, but a few minutes later she came back in holding a huge, fluffy owl that didn’t seem to mind being carried round.
‘Six,’ he said, somewhere between laughing and terrified. ‘They bite, put it down.’
‘He doesn’t bite. He’s called Owlbert. He’s coming too.’ She held it out to him, looking awkward, and he realised she was trying to make up for not being as companionable as she thought she should be. Owlbert hooted, a deep smooth purple.
Thaniel had to swallow hard. ‘All right, petal. Let’s go and find a cage then.’
For his part, Owlbert seemed so tame that Thaniel suspected he was probably considered a bit of a holy fool in the owl world. Thaniel took him carefully and held out his arm to see if he wanted to fly away, but the owl only shuffled up closer and pushed his head under Thaniel’s chin.
‘Owlbert loves you,’ Six offered mutedly, not looking at him.
He knelt down to see if he could catch her eye. ‘You know it’s all right to do things a bit differently, don’t you? You don’t have to touch people if you don’t want. Your way’s not wrong.’
She nodded once, still at the floor. ‘No, but yours is, you’re extremely peculiar and trying. You really do take it out of me.’
PART THREE
TWENTY-TWO
Abashiri, Hokkaido, 10th January 1889
Takiko slid the door open a few inches and then jerked back when a lot of snow tried to come in. Her uncle –not really her uncle, more like someone’s second cousin, but they had never quite worked out what – leaned back from the table in the next room when she picked up the spade. She glanced back and he gave her a guilty give-it-a-try motion with one small fist. She made a face at him to make him smile. She had tried to explain that you couldn’t feel guilty about helping less when you were eighty-four, but he wasn’t convinced.
The packed snow was printed perfectly into the shape of the door. She shoved the edge of the spade into it. Like she’d hoped, most of it collapsed, nearly all air and powder, but at about waist-height, it crunched with unpromising solidity. She dug slowly, not wanting to end up tired before she even started work. When she reached the end of the little path and broke out onto the main road, which had been cleared by the early prisoner detail, she heaped up a bit of snow at the edge of the path where her uncle would see it and gave it stick arms, and a face with bits of gravel. After some thought, she gave it a stick headdress as well, since there was no reason you couldn’t have a Mohican snowman.
Her uncle hurried out with a little bento box. In it was a square of shepherd’s pie to heat up. He had heard from some relative or other that she was foreign, and yesterday he had spent four hours looking at an ancient English recipe book he’d sent for from Tokyo, and put together with alchemical precision a perfect shepherd’s pie, because he said she ought to feel at home, and he wanted to feel useful. She squeezed his hands and did her best not to cry.
When she had arrived last week, the days were still clear enough to see Mount Shari. It was a long way off, miles over the marshes, but the peaks had been crookedly white against a blue sky. This week, though, the snow had fallen and fallen, and the murmur at the fish market that spring might be coming early had thoroughly died. Even indoors, her uncle had tied tiny hessian bags around the four pears his pear tree was making. It still looked worse for wear.
Takiko had never been in cold like it. She hadn’t even known that this kind of cold existed in Japan, but that might have been because she had never really thought of Hokkaido as Japan. The island was a great manta-ray shape, and in the northern part of it – Abashiri was right up near the manta ray’s left antenna – you were closer to Vladivostok than Tokyo. It was, everyone said with some pride, the southernmost point in the world where the sea froze.
The cold was convenient, though. It was easy to stay locked indoors going slowly mad with cabin fever, so her uncle hadn’t seemed surprised when she’d suggested she start working at the prison. They lived right next door, her uncle knew the guardsmen, and they had been looking for a cleaning woman for weeks. When her uncle took it up in his shy way with the warden, the warden had said hallelujah, the last girl had fallen in a ditch and frozen to death, and could she start tomorrow.
She stood in the road, holding the spade and looking up at the hill and the prison’s high tower. The cold was unbelievable, the shredding kind, and when she tried to put the spade down, it had stuck to her glove. She unpeeled herself.
She had never been inside a prison. Her uncle said this one was run well, though with fewer staff than it needed. People escaped every now and then, but not from inside; they ran when they were out building the new roads, in the forest where it was hard to see. The warden had solved that problem by dressing them all in bright red.
The main road was ridged with tracks, perfect half-sphere lines that cut through the snow in snaking patterns. Outside the prison gates, the prisoners all wore chains and a heavy iron ball around one ankle. One of the guards had come round for dinner last Wednesday and brought an iron ball for her to try on. She could move it, and it didn’t hurt, not with the thick leather straps that spread the weight, but it would have been impossible to go fast.
Takiko hadn’t gone far when she caught up with the prison detail. The prisoners were a brilliant red splotch in all the white, their guards mounted on either side. One of them saw her coming.
‘Move for the lady!’ he called.
‘It’s all right, it’s easier for me to go around you,’ she called back. He nodded, looking relieved, and she climbed on the hard-packed verge of snow.
&nb
sp; ‘Eyes front,’ the guard said tightly.
The prisoners were all quiet. The winter was too hard for anyone to think about anything but not freezing to the spot. Having tried the iron ball, she wouldn’t have been afraid of them even if they’d laughed and hooted. She could have outrun them hopping. They weren’t serious criminals, either. The serious ones were marched out at one o’clock in the morning. All last week, she’d woken in the night to the eerie labour song they sang as they trudged to the forest in the coal-pit dark.
The prison was at the top of the hill. On the north side, it overlooked the village and the sea; to the south and the west, there was forest, and to the east, the marshes and the fang of Mount Shari. Over that way, the dead reeds had buckled under the weight of the snow, and that whole stretch of land was a decaying colour almost the same as the strange brown sand on the beach. With the plunge in temperature, the trees were contracting still, and now she was close to them, she could hear their weird laughing, a guttural noise that some prehistoric instinct wanted to get away from.
Snow had blown up against the prison walls like buttresses and settled along the tops of the gates and the watchtowers. It was a vast irregular place. Between the long frozen winters and the warm summers, wood crumbled fast, and so some pieces of the structure were always newer than others and some were rotting. It smelled of fresh-cut wood and mould, and moss, and the sharp salt zing of the sea.
At the little side gate beside the main one, she looked back down the hill. The sea was frozen. It was still moving, just a tiny swaying, crunching bits of ice together in ridges and chunks. She banged on the door.
‘Hey, Mr Horikawa! It’s me.’
The door creaked open and Horikawa, the gate keeper, stepped back with his hands cupped over his cigarette to keep them warm. He spoke round it rather than move it. ‘In you come, girl, before the prisoners.’
She ducked in and he clanked the door hard behind her. The way in was a short tunnel under the watchtower above, open to the weather on the other side. A tiny staircase led up on her left. She stopped. ‘Do I just go to the main …?’
‘Expect so,’ he said, lifting his eyebrows to ask why she didn’t know. ‘Whatever you’re doing, do it before the detail gets in.’
She crossed the main courtyard, expecting someone to shout that she wasn’t meant to go that way. Something scratched at the door of what she had thought was a shed. It made her jump.
‘Can I come out yet?’ a voice whispered, nearly lost on the wind. There was no glow of a light or a fire from under the door, and no windows. It was only wood.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not a guard.’ She stared at the door. ‘Sorry,’ she said again, and crossed the courtyard as fast as she could, feeling dirty all the way. It was enough to make her want to turn around and leave. But she had promised not to.
A couple of nights before Christmas, coming back from a ride with Kuroda, whose horse had thrown him and who was limping back a fair way behind them on Tanaka’s arm, Takiko and Mori had followed the steep hill path up along the southern edge of the Yoruji graveyard. The horses were trotting parallel a short way off, playing and looking pleased with themselves. She was certain Mori had persuaded Kuroda’s to buck, although she hadn’t seen how.
The lighthouse flashed; from here, it was only possible to see the glow above the crest of the hill. Mori slowed and looked across the cemetery. He had an inhuman way of moving, fast and then slow.
Like silver cicadas, the bells in the trees and in the graveyard began to sing. Even though she knew just what it was, and that the lines were all connected back to the lighthouse and the machine there that generated random intervals, it was eerie. Near the gate and up by the house, dark figures moved; Kuroda’s men, changing their positions.
Mori pushed one fist hard into his chest, and by the uplight from her lamp, she could see the pulse in his wrist pounding far too fast. She’d seen people have nervous attacks before, actors mainly, but it seemed different on someone who was normally so calm.
She took his arm, pushed his sleeve back and then slapped his wrist, hard. His hand flickered and he nodded.
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.
Caught between exasperation and guilt, her voice came out with a sharp mix of both. ‘Why are you letting Kuroda do this? He’s got you trapped here. What’s in it for you?’
He shook his head slightly. ‘I don’t remember why. I can’t remember anything very well at the moment, not really past next week. Then it’s only snatches. There’s a strong chance I might be dead soon. It makes things foggy, because having a future at all is unlikely.’ He sighed. ‘It’s why Thaniel left. I kept walking into rooms and seeing him and thinking I was seeing a ghost; I was convinced he was already …’ He shook his head once. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve nearly died before, it hasn’t been like – it hasn’t made me feel confused. But I keep waking up and not knowing when I am. It feels like being drugged, I … well, maybe they will give me something and my useless brain is reacting beforehand.’
Quite gradually, the long nerve down her back shrank and pulled all the bones together. It hadn’t occurred to her until then that he was really risking anything at all. ‘If Kuroda could kill you, why is he still walking about?’
‘Because I need all this to happen.’
‘Why?’
‘I told you, no idea anymore. I just know I got myself into this on purpose. So it must be necessary.’
‘And you haven’t written anything down for yourself?’ She couldn’t keep all the incredulity out of her voice. ‘No instructions? At all? You’re walking through fire with no idea why?’
‘I had this done in Russia.’ He turned back his sleeve. Just under his elbow was a small, neat line of text.
Make Kuroda fight, but let him win.
‘What the hell use is that?’ she demanded. Without meaning to, she brushed the tattoo with her fingertip. Mori hated tattoos. They made you look, he said, like you were in the yakuza, and only teenagers and people who lived with their mothers wanted that.
Horribly, he relaxed when she touched him; as though it was all just Kuroda, not her too. Something deep in her gut twisted. It was easy to talk about Mori like a force, something terrible. It was easy to forget he was just a person too, with light bones and a deer’s shyness even around people he knew quite well.
‘Well, useful enough,’ he said. ‘It’s much better for me not to know in any detail.’
She didn’t understand.
He smiled. ‘I’m the easiest person in the world to interrogate. You don’t even need to hurt me, you just need to intend to and there I am writhing around on the floor like an idiot feeling ghost pain from a finger you haven’t even broken yet.’ He didn’t say, as you know. Her insides shrank up with guilt anyway, and a rotten sort of anger that he’d brought it up. She pushed it down. She had seen it too much in Kuroda now to imagine there was a single righteous thing about it. ‘Listen, Pepper … we talked a while ago about how I might need to ask you to do something for me one day.’
She frowned. ‘I asked what you wanted for a wedding present.’
‘Yes. It’s now.’ His eyes were serious and quiet, and like he always had when he fell still, he looked like something older than human beings. ‘I know you aren’t sure about me anymore. I know that what I did to Countess Kuroda was terrible. I’m not asking for a promise, just … some consideration.’
‘Why would I even consider it? I stopped feeling obliged to you the moment she hit the floor.’
‘I’ll give you anything you want.’
‘What? I don’t want money—’
‘I didn’t say money, I said anything.’ He shook his head once. ‘Anything. You want to keep me locked up forever, I’ll do it. You want Kuroda dead, I’ll do it, or ironclad women’s rights, or universities in Countess Kuroda’s name, a family; anything.’ He didn’t touch her, but his fingertips were an inch above her arm. ‘No tricks.’
S
he stared at him for a long time. She should have said no, she could feel it, but it would have been right on the line where prudence became cowardice. ‘Kuroda faces real justice for what he did, and you never manipulate anything ever again if it’s more significant than a pet rabbit.’
‘Done,’ he said softly. He looked fragile in that desperate, terrible, composed way he had on the night the Countess died.
She swallowed. He had killed the Countess, he was by every measure in the world a murderer, and God knew how often he’d done it when Takiko wasn’t there to see, but she had an awful sense that she had just slammed a beautiful wild animal, one that had always trusted her, into a cage. When she spoke, her voice came out too harsh. ‘So what is it you want me to do?’
‘There’s a prison camp in the north, in Hokkaido.’ He paused as if it was hard to make himself say the words. ‘Abashiri. You have an uncle who lives there; I sent him there years ago. Get inside the prison. I can’t remember now why you need to be there. But I do know that you need to look for something …’ He was staring hard into the middle distance. ‘Strange,’ he said at last. ‘Anything that doesn’t belong. I know that’s counterproductively vague.’
She hesitated. She’d heard about the prisons in the north. Everyone had. But only in general terms, because nobody ever came back, and they didn’t let journalists in. ‘Mori, you were in Russia for six months. And now the Russian fleet is here. What if you did that? What if what you’ve forgotten is that in the long run, you think Japan will be better off if it’s part of the Russian Empire, and you’re arranging the war?’
He nodded a little. ‘Yes. I sent them, yes, I told a friend in the Okhrana to send them before Kuroda’s new ironclads arrived. I don’t know why, though.’ He paused. ‘I told him something about wars and Americans, but I think I was lying.’
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 18