by John Healey
– V –
In which tea is prepared and the journey begins -A hand is lost and a friend secured
Before departing Sendai, Shiro was called to tea by his mother. It was just the two of them and the monk who performed the ceremony. Keeping his head bowed, the monk used leaves that were direct descendants of those brought from China by Eisai at the end of the 12th century. Once concluded and with the humble officiate paid and gone, mother and son remained.
‘We may never see each other again,’ Mizuki said, looking into her son’s eyes.
Shiro smiled. ‘Two years is not such a long a time, and you are still young and beautiful.’
Mizuki gazed down at the bamboo mat she knelt upon. She did not return his smile.
‘My husband was young and beautiful, like you, and died that way. My closest friend, Kókiko, tripped when she was fifteen, cut her knee, and was dead a week later from infection.’
‘Your husband died in battle,’ Shiro replied. ‘I go on a mission of peace. Your friend may have been clumsy, while I am sure of foot, and you are a portrait of grace.’
‘I did not ask you here to listen to flattery,’ she said. ‘You know of what I speak, the precariousness of life, the distances you will be traveling, the inherent danger for you. Hasekura Tsunenari is known for his greed, his son Hasekura Tsunenaga for his envy. Everyone knows whose sword you carry.’
‘The Lord thinks otherwise.’
‘The Lord is sometimes naive.’
Besides the mother of Date Masamune’s children, no one, Shiro knew, could speak of the Lord in such a manner.
‘I will keep your counsel in mind, mother.’
‘I worry about you,’ she said, softening.
‘There is no need to.’
‘Of course there is. And I regret sometimes the path assigned to you.’
‘The path?’
‘The Warrior’s Way.’
‘It is a great honor to follow it.’
She reached out to him, for the first time in many years, taking his right hand and kissing his sixth finger, the flesh of her flesh. He was part of her, made from her. The size and strength of him there next to her only served to reveal the chasm of time that had opened since the day of his birth. He had belonged to her.
‘It is said that we come into the world alone and alone we leave it,’ she said.
‘It is a guiding truth,’ he replied.
‘But it is a lie,’ she said. ‘When you came into this world, I was with you, you were attached to me. We were together. My fear, my terror, is that we shall leave this world without each other.’
‘If I promise to return, then you must promise not to fall ill, or trip upon the ground.’
She smiled and let him go.
‘I promise,’ she said.
‘Then you have my word as well,’ he said.
‘Here,’ she said, reaching into a fold of her kimono. ‘I want you to take this with you.’
She handed him a small envelope.
‘Biwa seeds,’ she said, ‘that my mother gave to me. Keep them with you, and we can plant them together upon your return.’
He took the envelope from her and bowed.
She noticed that a peony the monk had leaned to the side in the small vase next to his utensils contained a beetle that slowly made its way within the pink petals. She wondered what the room would look like were she its size, suspended within the glowing hue.
‘One more thing,’ she said to her son. ‘Try and not be lonely, try to love your loneliness, do not let it go, treasure it with all your heart.’
***
The ship was called the Date Maru. It set sail in the ninth month of the Christian year 1613 from Toshima-Tsukinoura. Mizuki cried all the day and night before. Lord Masamune saw the ship off, mounted on his horse. He watched from the harbor’s end as the vessel transformed from a large and colorful artifice of planks, masts, and shouting men into an ephemeral speck that disappeared from the edge of the horizon.
Conditions aboard were trying, even for the privileged Samurai. One hundred and eighty-two men on a vessel that size left little to the imagination. Early on, Shiro found a place on deck midship where he would spend long hours meditating, sharpening his sword, and gazing at the sea. It was a novelty he did not tire of. He preferred the view from the bowsprit, but it was there all aboard went to relieve themselves. He made himself useful, shunned special treatment, and did his best to adapt. The land you stand upon, he thought, the sea you fall through. A house kept one steady and private, a ship never ceased moving, and everywhere you turned there was someone an arm’s length away. Men fierce in battle vomited beside skinny merchants whose only use for a blade was to cut bread.
He noticed that Father Sotelo never got ill. The hawk-faced priest appeared especially energized by the voyage and often sought the ear of Hasekura Tsunenaga. Sotelo’s friars who accompanied him proselytized to a captive audience in a manner the young Samurai found unbecoming.
Through his own sources, Hasekura Tsunenaga had learned of the high esteem Shiro was held in by the Date Masamune. He also knew Shiro to be a bastard and thus, he believed, someone to be disparaged. During the first two weeks of the voyage, neither made any attempt to address the other, until one day, walking about the deck with his retainers, Hasekura Tsunenaga found the young Samurai alone at his station. They bowed to each other, Shiro prolonging his respectfully.
‘What is your name, young man?’ Hasekura Tsunenaga asked, knowing full well the answer.
‘I am called Shiro, my captain.’
‘You are with the Sendai Samurai.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And how do you find the voyage thus far?’
‘Most wondrous sir.’
‘I quite agree. But have you any complaints?’
‘No sir – or – perhaps one.’
‘And what might that be?’
After asking this question, he made the slightest of gestures toward the men with him, as if to say, what is one to make of the bastard’s cheek?
‘I am troubled,’ Shiro said, noting the gesture but seeing no path of retreat, ‘by the unsupervised contact between us and the barbarians.’
‘To what are you referring?’
‘To the unsolicited barbarian preaching.’
‘And what would you propose?’
‘Discipline my captain, segregation, mutual respect, our customary codes of conduct.’
‘You seem to forget, Shiro-san, the sole purpose of this voyage as dictated by your own Lord.’
Shiro could see the man would try to humiliate him and that he had erred in being forthright, but being young, he felt anger rising within. He wished to point out that Date Masamune was Hasekura Tsunenaga’s Lord as well, and the man who had pardoned Hasekura Tsunenaga’s life.
‘With great and due respect,’ Shiro said, ‘I have not forgotten. It is just that I feel the more we maintain our own way of life, even in these crowded circumstances, the more the barbarians will respect us, those aboard, and most important, those we shall meet across the great seas.’
The retainers raised their eyebrows, tensed their hands about the hilts of their swords. They had never heard a Samurai of Shiro’s rank address Hasekura Tsunenaga in this manner.
‘As the leading member of a noble family, I prefer to hear advice from my equals, Shiro-san.’
‘I was only answering your question. I regret saying anything you might find offensive.’
‘No harm done. And now I know better than to ask again.’
He made as if to continue with his inspection about the deck of the ship, but then he paused and added one more thing as Shiro remained bowed before him.
‘It will be a special pleasure when, reaching New Spain, I shall watch your baptism into the barbarian faith.’
Alarmed, Shiro knew better than to reveal it. He kept his head down and remained quiet until Hasekura Tsunenaga and his men moved on. Rumor of these baptisms had spread amongst the Se
ndai Samurai, but they had deemed it to be malicious gossip.
In the midst of a weeklong storm, a silk tradesman from Edo was lost overboard, a death Shiro could not erase from his mind. The brutal happenstance, the loneliness of it, the terror. After a month at sea, they moored off an island that had a stream they used to bathe in and to replenish their water supply. They drank coconut milk. Archers hunted birds. Shiro taught himself to swim. A week later en route again, sixty-three whales surrounded them. At night, awaiting sleep, Shiro contemplated what William Adams had called the Via Lactea, feeling unique and trivial in the same instant.
One day he overheard a Spaniard making fun of Father Sotelo. Though the young Samurai was grateful to the priest for all he had learned, he considered the man too proud, too enamored of young boys, and excessively fired up with Christian fervor. The offending Spaniard was from Sevilla and called Diego. He was aghast when Shiro addressed him in Spanish. From then on, they took their evening meals together.
‘Each day you get closer to your home, and I farther away from mine,’ Shiro said one evening when there was still light enough to observe a school of dolphins racing ahead of the ship.
‘You will return to Sendai one day, my friend, and have adventures and tales to tell for a lifetime,’ Diego replied.
‘That is difficult for me to imagine.’
‘As it was for me when I set off from Sanlúcar three years past.’
There came a week of humid weather and doldrums when the ship went nowhere and tempers frayed. Diego tripped over a dozing Samurai loyal to the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, and an argument ensued that quickly escalated. They began to curse each other, raising the ante, spewing epithets neither understood the meaning of. When Diego made the fateful decision to pull out his dagger—so enraged did he become at the bullying gibberish spit his way—the Samurai drew his sword and in one stroke severed the Spaniard’s knife hand from the rest of him. A geyser of blood shot forth. Everyone cried out and gathered around the two men in a circle. Diego fell to his knees staring at his wound in horror as the offended Samurai raised his sword with both hands to finish him off. It was then that Shiro broke through the circle to deflect the blow with the sword given to him by Date Masamune. His attempts to calm his unhinged colleague failed, for the Samurai insisted on more blood. As another Spaniard pulled Diego to safety, staunching the wound with the shirt off his back, the rest of the men looked on in thrilled fascination at the dueling warriors. The aggressor was gruff, experienced, and massive, Shiro, who had never fought in battle, lean and poised.
In five classic strokes executed with a degree of precision that would be much commented upon, Shiro disarmed the older man, knocking the sword from his hand and sending it out over the water. The Shogun’s Samurai, humiliated beyond repair, bowed to Shiro, went to his knees, and, before anyone could stop him, drew his Tanto blade and spilled his bowels upon the already bloodstained deck. Hasekura Tsunenaga reached the scene furious. He feared for a riot and feared even more that the young Samurai would be revered for his decisive intercession.
Diego was cared for but almost died from fever after his stump was cauterized. Whatever sympathy Father Sotelo had gained among the Samurai with his teachings evaporated the instant he explained how their colleague’s soul would now burn in the Christian hell-fires for all eternity because of his suicide. Shiro was detained and brought to the captain’s cabin after three days of being locked below without food or drink.
‘What have you to say for yourself?’ Hasekura Tsunenaga asked him.
‘Would you rather the Samurai from Edo had beheaded the barbarian?’ Shiro replied quietly.
‘How dare you speak to me like that?’
‘How dare you imprison me with no cause?’
‘I have kept you from the Edo Samurais’ revenge.’
‘You have kept me without food or drink. The Edo Samurai, like the Sendai Samurai, follow the Warrior’s Way. There is no cause for revenge.’
‘I thought you were for remaining apart from the barbarians.’
‘I had no choice in the matter.’
‘And yet no one else intervened.’
The cabin had a window, and through it Shiro could see the ocean, calm that day, dark and purple as eggplant. Hasekura Tsunenaga continued.
‘There is only one representative of Date Masamune in this Delegation, and that is I. I speak with his voice. I represent and shall intercede for his interests. You are nothing but a bastard boy tolerated at his whim.’
His retainers believed Hasekura Tsunenaga had acted out of weakness, that punishing the young Samurai would only tarnish his own authority, that the correct course would have been to praise Shiro and commend his actions. But they did not say so. He was returned to the deck but without his sword, for Hasekura Tsunenaga coveted it. The Samurai from both houses welcomed the young man and commiserated with him. Diego regretted his fit of anger and thanked Shiro for saving his life. Father Sotelo and the other priests shunned the young man. Shiro felt changed. The first real sword fight of his life and the three days of imprisonment had toughened him. Stripping and gripping a line, he let himself be dragged through the sea, letting the cold salt water cleanse and refresh him.
A week later gulls visited the ship, and as it emerged from a thick mist one morning that lay low upon the water, they found themselves a hundred yards off a rocky beach of what would one day be called the Monterey Peninsula. It was part of the land Spanish explorers had named ‘California,’ after the imaginary paradise described in Garci de Rodríguez Montalvo’s book Las Sergas de Esplandián. The Date Maru came about and tacked south, hugging the coast. Several hours later, it finally dropped anchor at the small, protected cove of San Simeon.
– VI –
In which naïveté becomes a burden
Doña Soledad Medina y Pérez Guzman de la Cerda became a widow at the age of thirty when her fifty-four-year-old husband perished from a heart attack while ravishing the plump fourteen-year-old daughter of his game warden. The fortune Doña Soledad inherited, when added to her own, made her one of the wealthiest women in Europe. After a failed love affair with her cousin, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, she took on one more lover, the priest, another cousin once removed, who had baptized and buried her sons. But on the occasion of her forty-second saint’s day, Doña Soledad’s chambermaid informed her that the priest had been heard having relations with the cook’s younger sister. She paid the cook handsomely to have the priest poisoned and never went to bed with another man. It was around this time, seeking to fulfill a long buried and much frustrated desire for a daughter, that she transferred all her remaining affections to her niece, Guada.
When Don Rodrigo returned to Sevilla and confirmed the news concerning Julian’s relationship with Marta Vélez, Doña Soledad was present. She had known for some time about Rodrigo’s long-term dalliance with the Vélez woman, as well, but she had never whispered a hint of it to Doña Inmaculada. She never liked the idea of Julian Gutiérrez y González marrying her favorite niece. She considered his family, despite claims to old blood and significant properties, inappropriate for the prized maidenhead of a singular Medinaceli. As she listened to Rodrigo’s declaration that day and comforted Inmaculada afterwards, she swore an oath to herself to try and, somehow, set things right.
A month before the wedding, she had Guada to lunch. They sat at a small table in a private dining room adjacent to the lesser of Soledad’s two gardens. The young girl was beautiful, as beautiful as she herself had once been, and as they ate two platefuls of delicate baby shrimp, shells and all, washed down with a chilled Manzanilla wine from one of her many bodegas, the older woman came straight to the point.
‘May we speak in absolute confidence, my dear?’
‘Of course.’
‘Your parents have discovered something unpleasant concerning Julian, and as they are too ashamed to speak with you about it, they have placed their trust in me.’
‘Are you being serious, aunt?’
>
‘Quite serious, my dear.’
‘What sort of unpleasantness?’ the young girl asked.
‘It seems he has a mistress.’
‘You mean his aunt, Marta Vélez?’
‘Good god girl, do you know about it?’
‘I’ve known for as long as we’ve been betrothed.’
‘I don’t know what to say. Do you approve of such a thing?’
‘How could I? But I’ve been grateful for his honesty. We’ve argued about it on many occasions, and he has promised me, for some time now, that once we marry he shall not see her again.’
Soledad wondered whether the girl also knew about her father’s entanglement with the woman but thought it best not to ask.
‘You amaze me,’ she said. ‘I had no idea you were capable of such sangfroid.’
‘I don’t know what it is. I only know that I love him and that was part of him when we became engaged. What is more unpleasant for me is that my parents and you know of it.’
Soledad finished her drink and took out her fan, opening it with an expert flick of the wrist.
‘Do not concern yourself about that, my dear. Leave it to me. If, as you say, you love the boy in spite of this, then that is sufficient. The reason I invited you here was to see if you still wished to carry through with the wedding, but I see the answer is yes.’
‘Absolutely yes.’
‘And you think he will do as he promised?’
‘To stay with a woman as old as she, once he has me all to himself, is inconceivable.’