The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  It wasn’t the cows. The guards were shooting men straight over a big open grave. Takiko watched for a second and thought absently that everyone was going to get cholera when the ground thawed.

  ‘Fuck!’ someone yelled from inside.

  It sounded like the warden. She went inside, in case he had finally collapsed, but in fact he was standing at the top of the stairs, in the doorway of his office, holding another telegram.

  ‘It’s Kushiro,’ he said. ‘The mines have flooded. They’re closing too. The survivors are coming here. As well as Kabato, and bloody Hakodate. Where do they expect me to put them, in a box? We’re going to have to build a new wing – oh, my head,’ he said, and bumped it against the wall. From the window, she saw the gates open, and the first men come through. The warden sighed, straightened again, and seemed to remember something. He patted himself down, went to the hidden door in the wainscoting, opened it, and disappeared up the stairs. She frowned and strayed to it, only to almost bump into him coming back down, leading the old prince by his arm.

  ‘You’re free, now bugger off,’ the warden said.

  ‘I’m what?’ the old man said, bewildered.

  ‘Free! Go away! Make friends with some fishermen or something.’

  The man looked helplessly at Takiko, so she gave him directions to her uncle’s house and hoped they would both be as pleased with each other’s company as she thought.

  She should have kept quiet, but it was too much. Part of her had swelled up like a hot-air balloon, just ready to float. They needed the cell free. ‘What was it all for, the lock and …?’

  ‘Oh, every prison in Hokkaido has to have one,’ he said. He glanced down at her. ‘Regulations are to keep it running. Why are you asking me questions? I’m busy. You’re busy. Go away.’

  The warden from Kabato was the first through the gates. He looked terrible. He had black frostbite on both hands and across his face, but he bowed stiffly all the same and thanked them for taking his men. Two-thirds of them, he explained, had died of the cold on the way, and so the situation was not as drastic as it might have been. He would have joined them, but he had a prisoner to explain. He glanced bitterly back to the gate, where men in red were trudging through. They all had sacking tied over their boots and the same exhausted hunch.

  ‘It’s all rather strange,’ the Kabato warden began.

  ‘It’s all right, you need not explain,’ said the Abashiri warden. ‘I was briefed months ago.’

  The Kabato warden shrank by three or four measures. ‘Well, that’s something. In that case, I should be obliged if you would shoot me, sir.’ With some difficulty, he handed over his revolver. ‘I’ll lose both hands and half my face. I shan’t be anything but a damn drag on my wife.’

  ‘Naturally,’ their own warden said gently. He looked sad, but he was too polite to say anything so patronising as, are you certain. ‘Let’s go outside and find you something nice to look at.’

  They went away together and left Takiko watching the men file in. There were so many. She wasn’t used to seeing crowds anymore. The Abashiri work details were only a few dozen. As the courtyard filled up, the guards began to herd prisoners inside, Kabato guards sharing ragged clipboard papers with Abashiri guards and pointing out, she supposed, different varieties of criminal. The murderers bound for the high security wing had come in first.

  And then there was a strange hollow in the caravan. People had hurried or lagged to avoid a particular space. In the middle of it was a tall, broad guard who looked like a bear in his winter furs, leading a much slighter man on the end of a chain. Takiko realised suddenly that she was going to go mad if it wasn’t Mori, if she had to wait anymore, and so, ridiculously, to delay the moment she would have to find out, she turned away fast, trying to think of chores. Tea; yes. She ducked into the guards’ empty office to make some tea, six pots so she and the five prisoner-helpers could take enough round for a decent number of people.

  ‘There’s so few of them,’ one of them said quietly.

  When they came back out, the big guard was unlocking the chain around the smaller man’s hands. She knew it was Mori even before he turned around; she didn’t know anyone who moved quite like he did, quick and then slow. He must have had something over someone, because despite all the precautions, he was clean-shaven.

  ‘Hello,’ she said to the guard. Her voice sounded amazingly steady. The cups on the tray shook when she held it out, but she nearly convinced herself it was just the cold. ‘You look like you’ve had a hell of a time. Tea?’

  Attracted to the clink of china cups and the wisps of steam, some of the mounted guards drifted across too. The five tea-bearing prisoners started to hand around cups. The guards only stared at them at first as though tea were an imaginary thing from a story.

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ said the big guard. His sleeves were covered in frost, but he took the first cup and put it between Mori’s chained hands. He did it with a kind of shy reverence, and a flicker of his eyes that made her wonder if he was anxious to make up for something, the chain maybe.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she said. There was a lump in her throat. Mori had looked at her, but his eyes had gone straight through and then sharply down at the unexpected heat in his palms. It had made him jump and he frowned. He seemed like someone coming partly out of a dream, and as he stared around, it was plainly the first time he’d been entirely aware of what was around him.

  ‘Our lucky charm,’ the guard said, smiling over his cup as the others came for one too. ‘He got us all the way through them woods without a scratch on us.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He knows the future. Hey,’ he said gently to Mori. ‘Say hello to the lady …? Sorry, miss, he can’t always tell what’s what in the here and now. He’s not trying to be rude.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said tentatively, hoping Mori was acting, and absolutely, coldly certain that he wasn’t.

  The warden stamped back in then, by himself this time. ‘Aha. You must be Mr Nishi?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’ The guard bowed. ‘Is the warden …?’ His eyes flicked out to the side gate through which the Kabato warden had not returned, and then, just for a skitter of a second, back to Mori.

  ‘Yes.’ The warden sounded weary. ‘And while is it very proper and socially responsible and upstanding and so forth, I do wish I weren’t obliged to shoot people in front of my favourite view. Puts one off. Anyway. Right.’ He studied Mori, curious and wary together, then glanced around the emptying courtyard and the men holding Takiko’s teacups. In a gesture of real decency Takiko had not expected, the Abashiri guards had taken over from the Kabato ones without a murmur. ‘Prisoners all tucked up, gentlemen?’

  There was a murmured chorus of yes-sirs.

  ‘Well – up to the tower, then. I think you fellows deserve to drink your tea in the warm. Miss Tsuru will look after you excellently.’

  Takiko went up with them and made another round of tea. More wood went on the fire, and soon the warden’s office was full of the animal smell of damp fur drying, and sweat. Dr Fujiwara had come up to look at the Kabato men, several of whom had frostbite. When the warden took a cup, he paused and massaged his temple with the hot rim, wincing.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ she murmured, half to cover over the thud of her own pulse in the long vein in her neck. It was so hard she was sure they could all see it.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine, the splatter missed me rather,’ he said. ‘Although I think I might be dying of a brain tumour. You’re all swimming in sparkly lights.’

  ‘You need glasses,’ Mori said.

  ‘Sorry?’ The warden frowned. And then, as if a bird had spoken to him, he looked to the kind guard for translation. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘You need glasses,’ Mori repeated. ‘It’s not a tumour. You have headaches because your eyes are straining.’

  ‘What?’ the warden said slowly. ‘But I can see.’

  Mori had already lost interest. He looked at the kind guard an
d handed over a tiny paper crane, which he’d made from a scrap of paper he’d picked up from the desk. The guard laughed gently.

  ‘Tsuru, that’s right. There you are, miss, I expect that’s for you.’

  She took it gradually. She couldn’t tell if it was just that some half-wakeful part of his mind had put together the word and the meaning, or if it was the closest he could come to hello in front of everyone. She tucked it into the top of her belt. The warden was still staring at him.

  ‘My dear fellow, are you serious?’

  ‘Oh,’ the guard said suddenly, and produced a pair of spectacles. ‘He gave me these ages ago, said to keep them. I had no idea what he was on about at the time, but, you know. You get to trust him. Must be for you.’

  The warden took them slowly, put them on, and read a note he had written on the back of his hand. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with himself.

  ‘I think,’ the warden said finally, ‘that we all deserve something a bit stronger than tea.’ He was watching Mori still, rather than the room generally. ‘And I think we can afford to unchain this gentleman, just for a few minutes.’

  After perhaps half an hour, the courtyard below was as still and quiet as it had been this morning, and the snow began to cover over the tracks. Sitting still with wine and a fire, and looking out at the white gatehouse and its little lights, the whole thing felt like Christmas.

  A bell on the kind guard’s watch dinged. Everyone looked around, except Mori, who had his hands flat on the floor as if it was moving.

  ‘Ah,’ said the warden. ‘That means a new dose?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the guard. He looked uncomfortable, but he took a neat medicine box from his pack. Out of it came a delicate vial, and a syringe. Mori’s arm was already a mess of needle scars. He frowned when the needle went in, but then, horribly, his expression faded down to nothing, and his focus moved a thousand miles somewhere beyond the floor.

  Dr Fujiwara pursed his lips and held Mori’s wrist, looking to one side while he counted. Despite his seriousness, his purple necktie made him look festive. Before enough time had passed for him to have taken any kind of average, his eyebrows lifted, but he seemed not to see the point in saying anything to the warden, who was conscientiously ignoring him.

  Takiko couldn’t watch any more. ‘What is that stuff ?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s clever. Chinese,’ Mori’s guard said, with muted cheer. ‘It makes him remember better. That’s what he calls it, remembering, but forwards instead of back. Only there’s quite a lot more future than past, it looks like, and – well, lately, I don’t know if he can tell what did happen from what might have, or what could happen from what is. Here and now looks a bit remote in all that. I think.’ His eyes flickered back to Mori, who still hadn’t moved.

  ‘He’s getting worse,’ someone remarked.

  ‘It’s the same dose,’ his guard murmured.

  ‘Yeah, but he’s getting worse.’

  ‘Can I see that?’ Dr Fujiwara said, holding his hand out for the case. When Mori’s guard gave it to him, he took out one of the glass vials. The label was in dense Chinese. He frowned. ‘This is for patients with hysterical disorders.’

  ‘I don’t know the details, sorry,’ the guard said.

  ‘Yes – it induces high blood pressure,’ Fujiwara said, frowning. ‘Which is fine for hysterics, because there’s an imbalance to even out; the effect is to allow them to sit still and regain calmer cognition by slowing the blood supply to the brain. But give this to a healthy person and you’ll eventually induce … well. Stroke, heart attack, dementia.’ He lifted his eyes on the last one. ‘Students take this all the time as a studying aid – it gives you huge concentration, you never fidget or get bored. Marvellous til you keel over. Headaches, sudden spinal pain, dizziness, any of this familiar?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have said if he’d had any of that,’ Mori’s guard pointed out, frowning too. ‘Our doctor said – well. It was orders from on high, you know?’

  ‘Bloody Tokyo. Trust them to find a piano and decide that the best way to play it is to hit it with a sledgehammer.’ Fujiwara had gone down on his knees to look into Mori’s eyes. ‘Can you tell me if you’ve been having headaches?’ he said carefully.

  ‘Of course I’ve been having headaches,’ Mori said, sounding, more than anything, amused. ‘What d’you expect?’

  ‘Oh, glorious,’ Fujiwara said. He gave the guard a black look.

  Mori was looking out the window, down into the courtyard, as if he expected something to be happening there. Takiko glanced down too. The courtyard was empty.

  ‘Well, I received orders from Tokyo,’ the warden chirped, in a way that was clearly meant to put an end to any debate. He brought out a telegram and unfolded it to show them all. ‘The Russian fleet is still very close to Nagasaki, but, thank heaven, our new fleet is nearly here. We are to ask Mori here exactly how to form up the battle in order to see the Russians off. The Prime Minister wants every single one of their fleet sunk.’

  There was a flutter outside. The owls were flying away, towards the town and the sea. Takiko looked at Mori, but he was still watching the courtyard.

  FORTY-ONE

  The warden opened out a maritime map on the floor. The land was marked on it – Korea, China, and Japan – but the details were about the sea; the shoals, currents where they whirled around the Sea of Okhotsk, wind direction. Its scale was big, and it took up most of the broad space by the hearth. The paper crackled, razor-sharp along its folds. It was brand new. It had come from an envelope, now open on the warden’s desk, labelled ‘The Weather Station Project’. Because the map was so big, it took four of them to flatten down the corners with cups and books.

  ‘Right,’ said the warden. ‘Now what does he do?’

  Mori’s guard moved him carefully, tugging him down from the hearth to kneel on the floor at the edge of the map. The edge of Takiko’s skirt covered Siam. ‘You have to ask him. But – you have to be careful how you ask. It has to be precise or he doesn’t understand.’ The guard hesitated. ‘Odds are he might not anyway. You have to make sure you’ve only got one question in mind at a time. Otherwise he’ll answer what you might say in ten minutes’ time. You can’t … be in a hurry, sir.’

  ‘I see, I see,’ the warden said. The other Kabato guards had gathered around too, interested to see what would happen. ‘How does he know? He sees the future, yes? But not the objective future, his future. So how in the world would he know what’s going on in Busan or out to sea if he’s here with us?’

  The guard nodded. ‘Newspapers. We bring in hundreds and hundreds of newspapers. They’re always old, but as long as we order them in, he can remember reading them.’

  ‘Miss Tsuru,’ the warden said to Takiko. ‘In that envelope is the exchange number for the department in the Home Ministry running all this. The contact is a Mr Tanaka. Get on the telegraph and ask them to send copies of every daily paper, immediately.’

  Takiko nodded and found the paper that outlined how to reach the Home Ministry department. It was complicated. There were three passcode words. Everyone watched her as she sat down at the telegraph. The clattering chink of it was loud in the silent room. The buzz that came from the operator at the other end was much faster and more professional than her hesitant code. Order confirmed.

  The warden nodded for too long, nervous now. ‘Let’s give it a stab, then, shall we? Mr Mori …’ He hesitated while he put together the words. ‘Show me the coordinates that must be occupied by the Japanese fleet, in order for you to read of the sinking of one hundred per cent of the Russian fleet.’

  The guard put a pencil in Mori’s hand. The pencil began to move over the map while the warden was still talking, and then the room faded into a deep, attentive silence. Mori didn’t do what Takiko had expected; he didn’t just mark on some crosses straight off. Instead, he took the pencil by its very end and held it loosely, like he was scrying with it, and moved it gradually up and d
own the map, starting on the Korean side and moving east. His hand hitched halfway up the Sea of Japan as if he had felt the pencil lead bump something invisible on the paper. He moved the tip to and fro three or four times more, and then marked the place. It was the first cross of twenty-five, across the west side of Japan. Some of them were in a cluster off the coast of Nagasaki, and some were very close to Abashiri, hardly a mile out to sea. It looked very much like the Russians had staged a large distraction off mainland Japan to make everyone look at Nagasaki, but a wholesale invasion of Hokkaido in the north.

  ‘Good grief,’ the warden said quietly.

  Mori was still writing. He was annotating the crosses with the names of battleships. Takao-maru, Katsuya-maru, Heian-maru. She knew most of them, from Kuroda. Mori put smaller battleships and frigates off the mainland coast. The dreadnoughts, the city-sized ships crewed by a thousand men, he stationed off Hokkaido; right by Abashiri.

  ‘Good thing so many prisons have had problems,’ Mori’s guard said once it was done. He sounded a little awestruck. ‘We’ve got practically our whole labour force in just the right place, if the Russians do manage to land here. Do you think … he did it on purpose, to make sure we’d be able to defend the coast?’

  The warden was studying the map still. He snapped his fingers suddenly at Takiko. ‘Back on the telegraph. Send them those names and coordinates. Someone write down the coordinates for her,’ he added.

  There was an unobtrusive clatter as Mori dropped the pencil. He was kneeling already, but he leaned forward with his hand flat to the floorboards again, looking dizzy. His guard looked uneasy.