The Samurai's Daughter

by Lesley Downer

  But with the sword descending on his neck there was no chance of that. He was going to die and that would be an end of his mission. The disgrace was unbearable. A samurai didn’t fail.

  Suddenly a voice barked, ‘Stop!’ The lark paused in its song and even the air seemed to stand still. Instead of the death blow, a foot kicked him hard in the back, slamming his face into the rocky soil.

  ‘We need him alive,’ snapped the voice. ‘We’ll take him back to our master. He could have information.’

  Nobu recognized the accent. He knew how ruthless the Satsuma were, all the more so now they had their backs to the wall, like beasts at bay. At least these men were not master swordsmen, he thought. If the blade had been in Aizu hands, his head would have been rolling down the hill by now. He was thankful too that they wore straw sandals. A boot would have done far more damage.

  He tried to get to his knees but another kick knocked the breath out of him. He tasted earth and blood and wondered if he’d lost any teeth. Rough hands snatched the rifle from his shoulder and held him down while others seized his sword and dagger and rummaged through his pockets. Four or five of them, he guessed.

  ‘Bullets! We could do with those.’

  ‘Rice balls. And what’s this? Water. Fellow’s well equipped.’

  ‘We’ll take some back.’

  ‘There’s not enough to share.’ Nobu heard lips smacking and grunts of appreciation as the men wolfed down his supplies. At least they hadn’t found the letter. He knew they’d destroy any missive from the head of the enemy command.

  A sandal slammed into his ribs and a voice shouted, ‘On your feet, hands in the air or you’re dead.’

  The sun beat down on Nobu’s head. His sandals were in tatters and his feet were torn and bruised. He had no idea how long they’d been walking. He needed to keep his wits about him, to work out a way to get the letter into Kitaoka’s hands, but all he could think of was his bruised ribs and the pain in his legs and the rifle barrel slamming into his back whenever he stumbled or stopped for breath.

  He heard panting behind him and wondered if Sakurai and Sato were there, if they’d been caught too.

  He’d been climbing for what felt like hours over rocks, around trees and bushes and through bamboo groves until he came to an enormous stockade stretching right across the hillside. His captors shoved him through an opening and he found himself in a stone-paved trench with woven bamboo walls topped with mud pats bound with straw, thick enough to stop bullets.

  He was stumbling along in a daze when a shove in the back sent him staggering forward. He tripped over something, lost his balance and fell.

  When he raised his head, he was in a broad open space with crags all around, bristling with trees and bamboo. To one side was a vertical cliff, forming a natural fortress. The place was packed with men, bearded like brigands, toting rifles or swords. They closed in around him, black eyes glittering out of dirt-stained faces. Even to an unwashed soldier like Nobu the stench of sweat and grime was enough to make him retch.

  So this was the dragon’s lair. He’d been searching for the rebels and he’d found them – the rump of them, that was, those who hadn’t died or given themselves up. There were fifty or a hundred, maybe more, some with bloodstained bandages around their heads, others with the stump of an arm or leg swathed in dirty rags. They looked half starved and half crazed.

  There were veterans of the civil war, grizzled and beefy with thick beards and square jaws, who must have taken part in the assault on Aizu nine years earlier. But under the dirt and stubble a lot looked like youngsters. Some were in tattered broad-sleeved jackets and striped trousers, like peasants, with thick rags around their feet and rope sandals, others in army uniforms, faded, torn and filthy.

  They stared at him with hostility, contempt or blank indifference. Voices boomed around the rock walls.

  ‘Went hunting for rabbits and look what we caught. Spies!’

  ‘Why drag them here? You should have chopped off their heads.’ One skeletal fellow licked sunburnt lips. His skin was leathery but Nobu could tell by his voice he was young.

  Another stepped forward with a swagger. He’d lost an eye and had a scar across one cheek. ‘We certainly fooled you, didn’t we? Last thing you were expecting was for us to turn up back on Castle Hill! You may have the numbers but we have the strategy, we have the brains, we have the ideals! You just do your job. We fight for our cause and our master.’

  Nobu tried to get to his feet but hands shoved him back on his knees. He stared at the earthen floor. He wondered if he should tell them that he was a messenger with an important letter for their revered general. But when messengers had been sent to the Satsuma besieging Kumamoto Castle, they’d ended up with their heads tossed back over the castle walls. He couldn’t expect any more mercy himself. He was a dead man.

  It had been a long and bloody five months.

  Most of Kagoshima’s grand samurai mansions, the merchant quarter, the shops and markets, even the rows of dilapidated houses in the geisha district had disappeared. A lot had been burnt or torn down by the army to make way for ditches, bamboo fences, piles of sandbags and rifle pits big enough to hold fifty men. The rest had been destroyed in the fighting.

  Troops of rebels had swarmed over the mountains and attacked again and again and eventually pushed the army back to their ships and thrown up earthworks of their own. It had been another month before the army had managed to drive them out and retake the city – or what was left of it.

  But the war was far from over. The enemy broke up into guerrilla bands and vanished into the hills. As summer began, Nobu had been dispatched from one battlefront to another. When he wasn’t on the road, he was firing his rifle or wielding his sword, deafened by gunfire and the roar of cannons, his eyes and nostrils burnt and blackened from the smoke of battle, so dense it was like fighting in a fog. At night he slept out on stony hillsides or under rocks with ants and lice nipping at him relentlessly. Then the rains had come, so heavy it was impossible to see anything at all, turning streams into rivers and paths to mud. Men began to fall ill from disease. For a while the army had almost given up trying to break the enemy.

  Bands of rebels wore the soldiers down with sneak attacks. Once, plodding through the hills, Nobu heard the men in front of him shout a warning. The track had been planted with bamboo spikes under a layer of earth. As the soldiers scrambled to leave the path, sharpshooters in the undergrowth picked them off. Nobu barely escaped with his life that time and many other times too. Sometimes he wondered if the gods were watching over him but he doubted it. He suspected they didn’t care.

  Then summer set in in earnest. Nobu had never known it so scorching. Men fainted from the heat.

  One day Nobu’s unit met up with a contingent of police, sent to swell the ranks. Nobu was overjoyed to find his brothers among them. They’d all three joined up when the government put out a call for ex-samurai – the only men who could withstand the mighty Satsuma swords.

  They’d spent the night drinking and exchanging stories. Sickly Kenjiro, his glasses miraculously intact, now had colour in his cheeks. Yasu, with his limp, was full of stories of the Satsuma he’d cut down, each one a blow for their womenfolk and for Jubei, he’d said. And Gosaburo had come all the way from Aizu to join the fighting.

  No matter how many soldiers fell, there were always thousands more. Shiploads of conscripts arrived from Tokyo and the government armaments factories worked day and night, churning out bullets and gunpowder, cannons and rifles.

  As for the rebels, local men swelled their ranks and the peasants, who were on their side, kept them informed of where the army was. But by now they were running out of ammunition and food and places to hide, as well as men. One by one they began to surrender. The army flushed them out again and again, beat them back by sheer weight of numbers till they were sure they had them cornered. Then they’d disappeared completely. For a few days no one knew where they were. And suddenly they’d popped u
p again, not in the north of the island, as the army generals had expected and planned for, but where they’d started – Kagoshima. They’d come home to die.

  After pursuing them round the island, Nobu too was back where he’d started. He even had a mattress to sleep on in the Kagoshima barracks. And he knew Taka was close, up in the hills somewhere. He wished there was some way he could be sure she was safe.

  He bowed his head to the ground and groaned. To think of her filled him with pain. Just as the war was nearly at an end, just as he could see a future ahead of him, just as he might finally have the chance to get back to her, to lose his life now – it was too unfair, too cruel.

  37

  A SHORT MAN in broken glasses prodded him in the ribs with a foot wrapped in vile-smelling rags. ‘You. What were you up to, sneaking around down there?’ The reedy voice echoed off the rock wall. The man might have been a schoolteacher before the war.

  More and more unwashed, unshaven men had gathered round Nobu and were glaring down at him. He wondered if they knew they were hemmed in like foxes in a trap. The army had thrown up defences right around the hill – bamboo fences as high as a man, then boards studded with nails, then a wide, deep ditch, then bamboo boards raised above the ground so if a man trod on them his feet would go through and his legs would be cut to shreds by the splinters, then a second ditch filled with branches, then a barricade of earth and sandbags, and behind that lot a line of soldiers, armed with muskets. Every bolt-hole was sealed. This time they had not a worm’s chance of escape.

  There was a thickset figure on his knees not far away. Sakurai. His head looked bloodied. But there was no sign of Sato. Dead, most likely, thought Nobu, as he and Sakurai would be too, very soon.

  He heard Sakurai’s nasal whine, pleading for mercy. When they’d come back from that first reconnoitre, five months earlier, Sakurai had boasted about how he and Sato had unearthed a nest of rebels and beaten them off single-handed. They had the bruises to prove it. In the telling Nobu and Taka and the villagers had turned into a whole army, of whom Sakurai and Sato had supposedly left a good ten or twenty dead. Nobu was the only one who knew the true story and he wasn’t saying anything.

  The two braggarts soon realized they’d made a bad mistake but by then it was too late. They’d been promoted and dispatched to the front lines and whenever there was a particularly dangerous task they were chosen. Somehow they’d managed to stay alive. Nobu too had been promoted and now, after not having seen each other for months, all three had been sent on this mission.

  Some of the rebels had already lost interest in the captives and shuffled away. Nobu heard voices and sounds of singing and music and recognized the tones of a biwa, a lyre. Someone was playing a Satsuma folk song. The place was as hot and close as a furnace. There were fires crackling but instead of food he smelt metal. He’d heard that the rebels were so desperate they’d started melting down cooking pots and spent bullets to make ammunition. It seemed the rumours were true.

  He scowled. These bullies were rank and file. It wouldn’t work to tell them his mission. They’d just destroy the letter. Somehow he needed to get into the presence of General Kitaoka. For the time being it was best to keep his mouth shut. His Aizu accent would only make things worse. Sakurai was silent too.

  Nobu heard the smack as the bespectacled man hit Sakurai round the head with the palm of his hand. ‘What were you up to?’

  Sakurai flinched. ‘We’ve got a …’

  A surly-looking fellow put his face close to Sakurai’s. ‘You know what we do to spies?’

  ‘Show him, Taniguchi.’

  The man bunched his fists and scowled at Nobu, then at Sakurai, as if trying to decide who to hit first. Nobu braced himself.

  ‘What’s going on?’ The crowd fell back and a pale man in an army uniform stepped through. He carried himself with an air of authority. Nobu made out a faded red stripe along the side of his ragged trousers. He’d once been an officer of the Imperial Guard, or perhaps he’d just stolen the uniform.

  ‘We caught them on the hillside, sir.’

  The officer stared down at Nobu. ‘What were you doing there?’ He had a stern impelling voice and spoke in a tone that required a reply.

  ‘I have a message for General Kitaoka, from General Yamagata.’

  The officer had an amulet dangling from his belt with a carved wooden toggle to keep it in place. It seemed an odd affectation. Usually people tucked them into a sleeve or a pocket.

  ‘So you’re an Aizu lad. You say you’re a messenger, so why not take the path? Why creep around like a thief?’ Nobu scowled and stared at the ground. The man knew as well as he did that he’d have been shot down before he’d managed more than a couple of steps. ‘What’s your message?’

  It was best not to mention the letter. ‘My orders are to speak directly to General Kitaoka.’

  ‘You think you can just walk into our master’s presence? How do I know you’re not an assassin?’

  ‘Hey, Kuni-don! Kuninosuké! What have we here?’ The crowd parted again and a swarthy man with his hair tied in a bushy tail pushed through.

  Nobu started. He knew that voice. Behind the dirt and thick beard he made out drooping eyes and a sensual, full-lipped mouth. Taka’s brother, Eijiro. He was suntanned, fitter and leaner, but it was him all the same. Nobu’s heart sank. Now he was really done for.

  He bent his back and lowered his head. With luck Eijiro wouldn’t recognize him. He remembered the last time they’d met, in the Yoshiwara, more than a year ago. He’d helped Eijiro out that time but it hadn’t done him any good at all. They’d been enemies from the start and they were enemies still. Eijiro wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, especially now that the rebels were at the end of their tether, and here was Nobu, tossed into their midst like a sacrificial offering. Eijiro must know he was going to die himself and it would no doubt give him the greatest pleasure to take Nobu along with him.

  ‘Prisoners!’ A pair of feet wrapped in filthy rags and encased in rope sandals planted themselves in front of Nobu. A hand grabbed his hair and wrenched his head back and Nobu found himself looking up at coarse black hairs sprouting from large nostrils. Eijiro drew back, spat on his hand and smeared the spittle across Nobu’s face. His eyes opened wide. ‘By all the gods! I’d recognize that ugly mug anywhere. Nobu, young Nobu. I can’t escape you. Wherever I go, there you are. You bring bad luck wherever you go.’

  He shoved Nobu to the ground and kicked him hard. Nobu screwed his eyes shut and rolled into a ball as the foot slammed into his ribs again and then again. He heard shuffling. The men had closed in and were watching, waiting their turn.

  The onslaught stopped abruptly. ‘Eijiro-dono. We’re not thugs. We’re samurai.’ Nobu uncurled cautiously and opened his eyes. The officer with the amulet on his belt had gripped Eijiro’s arm and pulled him away.

  ‘If you knew this fellow you’d kick him too. Bastard was a servant in our house. What do you mean by coming here, you traitor?’

  Nobu took a breath, grimacing, and licked the blood from his lips. Nothing he could say could make things any worse. ‘I have a message for your father.’

  ‘My father?’ Eijiro scowled. ‘I’m a sentimental man, I’m too soft-hearted, that’s my trouble. I remember now, the Yoshiwara, you helped me out that time. I should spare you for that. But you’re a soldier now, we’re enemies. You’d kill me too if you had the chance. I’m afraid I have no choice.’ He shook off the officer’s hand and took his dagger from his belt.

  ‘This is not a time for personal quarrels,’ snapped the officer. ‘The man is a samurai. He deserves respect.’

  ‘A samurai? He’s an Aizu and a servant. Insolent bastard. He behaved badly. I had to dismiss him. He was spending too much time with my sister.’

  ‘Your sister?’ There was an odd inflection in the officer’s voice that made Nobu look up. A dark flush had spread over the man’s stern face all the way to his ears. His eyes shifted and he looked away uncomfortably.
Nobu stared, puzzled. It meant nothing, he told himself. Taka must have known many Satsuma officers and how could anyone fail to admire her beauty?

  Eijiro looked from one to the other and began to grin. It was not a pleasant grin.

  ‘If he dishonoured her, he must be killed,’ said the officer coldly. He’d regained his composure but a trace of colour still tinted his cheeks.

  ‘She’s a foolish girl but not that foolish, though the gods know what he would have got up to if I’d let him have the chance,’ Eijiro conceded with a grimace. ‘General Kitaoka’s daughter – that would have been an excellent revenge. No, I kicked him out before anything terrible happened. He’s a pathetic creature, can’t even read. My sister felt sorry for him. I know you have a soft spot for her, Kuni-don.’

  The amulet on the officer’s belt glittered in a stray shaft of sunlight. It was a small brocade pouch, red embroidered with gold.

  Nobu stared at it, mesmerized, as it swung back and forth. He felt as if he were standing on the edge of a high crag, leaning further and further over while a sinister voice urged him to jump. He could almost see the ground rushing up to meet him.

  The amulet. It was horribly similar to the one he’d bought for Taka at Sengaku Temple. That didn’t mean anything, he told himself desperately. Anyone could have an amulet from Sengaku. It was a very popular temple. But the suspicion had taken hold. It gnawed at him, burrowing deeper and deeper until he no longer even felt the pain in his ribs.

  Then the amulet and the officer’s confusion and Eijiro’s gloating face snapped into place like pieces of a puzzle and he shut his eyes and groaned aloud. He’d seen men die by the hundreds, trampled over corpses, heard horses screaming as they were blown apart by cannon – yet nothing had shaken him like this. It felt like the end of everything he’d ever lived and fought for. All this time the thought of Taka had kept him going, given him hope that there could be an end to the fighting, a future. But now he was lost in a fog with nothing to hold on to, no direction, nowhere to go.