Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  Translator’s Note

  This would seem to be the best place to put another of the miscellaneous documents found with Rochefort’s Memoirs. The second section of the Memoirs follows immediately after.

  The Memoirs make extremely idiosyncratic use of respectful forms of address (dono, tono, hime, etc.), which may result from a misunderstanding of the language. Therefore, in this translation I’ve substituted the more familiar (if not so authentic) Edo Period san and sama, to make the narrative more accessible to modern English and Japanese readers.

  T here was one, once, who had the misfortune and bad taste to live past the climatic moment of his life.

  The best of deaths was offered to me and I missed it. My lord missed it, also, but had the fortune to die within two years, when some of the gold still clung to him and gave him the shine of glory. Lord Kobayakawa Hideaki. He was two-and-twenty years old when I stood at his grave. I was forty-seven.

  The pinnacle of our lives, two years before, had been a battle, and a great one—the great battle of our lifetime. When one has had the privilege of fighting with and against all the greatest daimyos of the lands of Nihon, when one has changed the future for all time by a simple and decisive act, what else is left?

  At Sekigahara, my lord and I fought. At the crucial moment of the battle, we went over to the side of the Eastern Army and your father, Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu, who by that victory was made Shogun. My lord Hideaki was rewarded with Chikuzen province. I was rewarded by being allowed to accompany him.

  We took a part in the last echoes of the war, as the great Shogun subdued outlaw lords and rebels, but it was anti-climactic. My lord wrote poetry on the subject. How a cherry blossom, holding onto the stalk into the heat of June, goes brown and rotten; better if it had fallen in the fullness of its white glory, in May.

  I have no place to criticise my lord Hideaki, and if the subject and treatment seemed hackneyed to me, I would have attributed it to his youth and excused it. On the field of battle, he was god-like. At court, among conspiracies, he did not shine. He turned from them, disgusted, spending more time with women, and gambling all night while emptying jug after jug of warm sake.

  So death came for him and was timely—an illness, not treachery, so he need fear no dishonour. We interred him when the yellow leaves fell. I passed into the service of his cousin, the new lord of Chikuzen province. So things stayed for six or seven years.

  I was a captain of ashigaru, under my lord’s cousin, and no longer the companion of a lord. That was well, I argued to myself at night. What lord wishes an old man as his companion, when that man is not particularly wise, skilled, or devout? Passing into my fifties, I could expect in time to be replaced as captain of the foot soldiers, and I might hope to be retired to a small farm, with servants enough to work while I spent my days overseeing them.

  On such nights I would patrol the grounds of my lord’s house—which I could never think of as his cousin’s house. I paced slowly, checking the sentries at odd times, and earning myself their respect and unmalicious dislike. I would walk by the gravel-garden, watching the shifting of the moon’s light on the crags, and smelling the moss and trees growing around the raked expanse. Invariably I would end at the top of one of Chikuzen’s low hills, looking north to the sea, as the sun rose out of the unknown east.

  A foolish thing for a samurai to do, you will say. I agree, I concede the point. My fingers were not skilled enough to cast the colours on a scroll, and my poetry, when I attempted it, had nothing of the delicacy of the masters. Perhaps I reached a point of satisfaction when I would strip off my armour and drill with my sword, there in the brightening light, celebrating the coming of the day with the only skill I have.

  Whether it was this evidence of individuality that caused my lord’s cousin to choose me, I do not know. He called me to him, ordered me to Edo with a small troop of soldiers, and told me to obey his son in the capital as I would himself. It was an unnecessary slight, but not enough to bring the total to a point where I might cut off the man’s head. He was not worth my own death.

  At Edo, I was given a place with the man’s son: we were to go on a ship, and sail for the land of the foreign barbarians. He was to be ambassador. They so often come to us, merchants and priests for the most part: now we were to go to them.

  I looked at the sea, when we embarked, and wondered if, on all those mornings, I had been watching my grave.

  I was not sorry to leave Nihon. My dead lord Kobayakawa Hideaki rested, I had no obligations there. His successor was unworthy: I did not consider myself obligated to him, either. And his son was a man of nothing much in any quality: neither brave nor cowardly, rash nor wise, decisive nor cautious. If I dislike any man, it is the hesitant one who changes his mind according to whomever last spoke to him: a feather for every wind that blows. Such men, daimyo though they may be called, do not have the right to demand the service of honest samurai.

  The sea inflicted me with a grave illness from the first hour that we set our sails and left port.

  I know, therefore, very little of the first few weeks. By the time I had recovered, we had met with a Dutch ship, and hove-to, to exchange news—that there would be little more trading, as we of Nihon listened more and more to those who said foreigners were malicious and harmful. And there was more. But as I came out of my illness, that was what stayed with me. That here was another point of decision, that I might be part of: keeping Nihon open to the world, or closing it, pure and secret, within itself. What we brought back from the land of the Europeans would sway this, I thought. As decisively as Sekigahara, even.

  I worked the ship, in the months that followed, taking time to learn from the ship’s master in the arts of navigation and sailing. It is necessary for a samurai to add to his skills, so that he may be a credit to his lord. I thought my lord Hideaki would have approved. I made sure the escort that I led, as the ambassador’s guard, made regular practise with their weapons on the swaying deck, and led them gladly against pirates when we were twice attacked.

  Slowly the world grew hotter, grew colder; coasts appeared like grey ribbons on our horizons and faded away again. The ambassador had no interest in what might lie ashore: we collected food, news, and sailed on. There were lands where men were darker than the aboriginal Ainu of Nihon, and plague came in on every wind. And then one coast, much later, which the ship’s master declared to be Espaine, the home of so many of the black-crow priests. I stared at it over the ship’s rail, not regretting that we would not land there.

  By this time, I had with my new lord’s permission acquainted myself with all the languages of Europe that I could. The crew of the ship sufficed to teach me a few words of Dutch and Gaelic, much English, and also much Portuguese, which I understood (mistakenly, perhaps) to be much like Spanish. I puzzled out Latin in a holy book of the black-crow priests, liking less and less what I understood of it; their worship of a criminal who had been given an untouchable’s death, and then became a kami whose place is everywhere and nowhere. The wise man placates spirits, he does not abandon himself to them.

  Grey waters, cold mists, heavy wool clothing that we must wear at all times—this was the burden of the next few weeks, while the ship fought to come north, turning and tacking again and again. The winds were against us. I found it more difficult to practise my sword drills on the icy wet deck, and whereas, as a young man, I would have welcomed this challenge, now I drilled with precise efficiency, and could not prevent myself longing for the heat of Chikuzen province.

  The seventh or eighth week in those waters, the ship’s master announced to me that we had made the opening of a great channel which had our destination—England—upon one side of it, and another country on the other. I was bold enough to ask my lord the ambassador if we should prepare for instant landfall. He instructed us that we were to stay on board ship: that we should sail further on, to the capital, and there be received as befitting a daimyo.

  I would have cheerfully been received as
the lowest of my ashigaru if I could have slept ashore. The sickness that had tormented me after leaving Nihon threatened again. After giving orders for the ashigaru to stand guard as usual on the gifts we had brought for the English Emperor, I went to my place below and attempted to sleep.

  I woke to the crash of a rock stoving in the side of the ship.

  No man who has been in a wreck ever forgets that moment. I jumped up, cast off my own armour, and made at a run for the cabin where my lord the ambassador kept his gifts. There, I ordered my ashigaru to protect the ambassador with their lives, and I put on one of the gift armours, believing that I could swim in it, were that necessary. I could not tell what to do with the other. For a moment I was near to despair, with men screaming and running, and the sea crashing loudly, and the suck and grind of the breaking ship sounding over it all.

  After a few precious seconds had expired, I rolled up the armour plates and stuffed them in a sack, together with the helmet, and tied it all around my waist. That done, and my swords thrust in their scabbards down the front of the armour—which was too big for me—and tied there, I began to climb up to the deck with the intention of jumping into the sea.

  Foaming waters broke down the steps as I attempted to mount them.

  Holding to the rail with one hand, mouth clamped shut on what air remained, I determined to swim out of the sliding wreck. I had missed one good death. This was no substitute. If I were to die, it would be after bringing home the news which was required from the Anghrazi—the Englishmen—and not before.

  I lived. But when I woke on the cold, solid sand of the shore, the sea had stripped me of armour and baggage. Unconsciousness took me again as I realised this, in the middle of swearing a vow to any god or kami that might be listening: that I would find the ambassador and whoever remained of my men, and carry out my orders, no matter what. My honour rests on it: there is nothing else that I can do.

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  9

  T he weather changing again to foul, it took us eight-and-forty hours to cross the seas to London, and the sun only opened his eye upon us when we stood well within the estuary of the Thames-river. I spent that time tormented with a jealousy I never wanted, nor desired now that I had it.

  Watching Mlle Dariole as she clung to ropes in the teeth of rain, and conversed with the captain in a boy’s cracked adolescent shout; or watching her in the cramped cabin, her face alive with enthusiasm as she questioned M. Saburo about his cattan-blades…. All of this is torment, I thought. That puts me out of mind of my duty.

  The Willibrod moored at one of the many docks in the Pool of London, south of London-bridge with its houses and nineteen arches. I suppose that it took just under a hundred heartbeats for me to spot the spy watching the ship, but I do have the advantage of a career in such things.

  He was no prime agent, in such a spot; merely the average tattle-tail maintained on a spy-master’s books, making himself useful by seeing who comes in daily from abroad. He leaned up against the wall of a low-doored tavern that the morning saw busy with captains discussing voyages, and merchants complaining about the rot crept into their cargoes. He would hire himself out as the traditional travellers’ interpreter, I guessed.

  But not to me.

  A very different arrival to my last, this; on the King’s barge with my master Sully, after a journey up from Dover. Making sure all the way that the damned English treated a Duc of France with sufficient respect—after the lord of Dover cozened M. de Sully into bringing our whole entourage with him on a visit to the castle, only so as to take the customary gratuity for seeing over the place from each and every one of us.

  At that time we had landed west of the City, upriver; not here in the poverty-stricken wards to the east. The London streets looked as cold as I remembered. And the horizon beyond St Katharine’s Stairs was an endless procession of church spires, under a brisk May sky.

  “There will be other spies,” I warned M. Saburo. “In any city with a royal court, the ground is always thick with informers.”

  “Hai! Edo!” Saburo stood by me at the ship’s rail, his arms carrying the folds of his cloak bundled in front of him. I assumed he concealed the Nihonese war-helmet. It did not leave his person. He made a raw sound like a guffaw. “No matter they’re not looking for us in particular?”

  “Quite.”

  Upriver stood the battlements of a great fortress, like the Arsenal that M. de Sully commonly inhabits, although the English use theirs also as a prison. Beyond that royal Tower is a great Gothic cathedral, the spire lost to fire many years ago. It made me momentarily desire, first Paris and Our Lady, and then the rich house called “Arundel,” here in London, where all my master’s entourage had stayed before.

  “Saburo-san. Be good enough to put back the hood of your cloak.”

  It was, in fact, my cloak; my caped and hooded Spanish travelling cloak that I took off an unfortunate enemy trooper in the Low Countries. It has had more than a decade’s wear since then. No man would mistake us for wealthy travellers.

  Saburo reached up, yanked the hood back, and stomped down the gangplank.

  I picked up the saddlebags, swung them up onto my shoulder to hide my face, and slouched down the plank after him, stooping a little to disguise my height.

  Tanaka Saburo was not strange enough that a man might immediately see anything wrong with him, but he was nonetheless apt to draw the eye. No man gazed at me as I disembarked. Nor at Mlle Dariole, I saw, as she followed after in her men’s clothing. The English spy watched only the man of Nihon, tongue-tip caught between his teeth like a child memorising Latin grammar.

  Suppose I go now to Sully’s man here, Beaumont? But he may have been recalled. Arrested, even. No: first one sounds out the ground….

  “The Medici will soon have agents here, if she does not now,” I observed, moving up beside Saburo. “And, if I know London, English spy-master Robert Cecil’s informers will be in the streets and taverns, along with other local amateurs.”

  There will be agents of Spain, known and unknown to the English government. Turks. Slavs. Agents of the Netherlands republic, who are more like to be economic spies—unless they’re from the French exiles at the court of the Archduke and Archduchess. One might find a few Jesuit priests in deep cover. And any one of them might be in disguise as any other!

  I cannot use the name of Rochefort. Or Belliard. Ravaillac will have talked days ago.

  “Quick, now, but do not appear hurried.” I ushered Saburo through the busy press of men on St Katharine’s Stairs, avoiding sailors unloading cargo, conscious of Dariole following.

  Where I would have led us up into the streets, towards London-city and away from these out-parishes, a group of men luckily rolled out of an alley into our way. In the course of the scuffle avoiding them, I successfully lost the informer. I squinted behind me, seeing him borne back among lean men with the look of merchant-adventurers, towards the taverns. Thirst won out, or perhaps he waited thirty heartbeats too long. I had us away and lost in the crowds before he could catch us up, sweat hot under my shirt and falling bands.

  Dariole caught up with a swagger, careless of the length of her sword behind her swatting at men’s calves. “That way.”

  “I hope your memory for cities is better than for languages, mademoiselle….”

  She shot me a look, and strode out in front, leading us by ways I dimly recalled from my more unofficial wanderings—by Hogges Lane to Tower-hill, where we walked between women laying out washing on the turf to dry, and then north-west into the city by Marck’s Lane. I lost my bearings somewhere south of More Gate, inside the city wall.

  “You here, before?” Saburo’s sentence ended on a rising, interrogatory note as he looked at me. “We stay where stayed then?”

  “The Duc de Sully was an honoured guest of the English King.” I shook off my thoughts, smiling grimly. “I don’t suppose us likely to be invited inside any great lord’s house, Messire Saburo. We must shift for oursel
ves.”

  Leaving Paris ten days ago, I had been short of funds. Now, a week’s expenses after that, and passage on the Willibrod…. When a man is self-evidently leaving the country ahead of the authorities, he frequently pays over the asking price. The fee for a horse’s passage on ship is, by old custom, two and one half times the price of a man. The Willibrod’s captain, knowing a man in a cleft stick when he saw one, swapped me two passengers’ fares for the Andalusian jennet plus a little of my remaining silver.

  I will have no more than two English pounds by the time I have changed coin .

  Saburo grunted. “Go to court soon?”

  “For any hope of success at court, you need money enough to grease the courtiers’ hands, and a suit of decent broadcloth at the least. I would say satin, save that this is the English rather than the French court….”

  He looked at me shrewdly. “You’re thinking, you should leave us now we are in London, Rochefort-san. Exception is, we’re still a difficulty for you.”

  Saburo made a wide shrugging motion.

  “How long before it’s no matter whether some lord-sama tortures out what I know? And she know? Or, always matter?”

  “That,” I admitted, “is a question I’ve been asking myself, Messire Saburo.”

  I had a momentary analepsis, seeing again the decapitated head that thudded down into the sand beside me. It was not that I trusted the man of Nihon, or took him to be honourable as I would understand it; more that his ways were strange enough that I thought it difficult for an enemy to suborn him without it being obvious. He will follow his own interests, true. And I ought to be cautious of developing too much sympathy for this foreign duelist, destitute, and far from home.

  I said, “Monsieur, I would not have blamed any man for seeing odds of twelve to two, or twelve to one, and deciding to make up thirteen or fourteen on the other side. Even I cannot kill twelve men in a fair sword and dagger fight. I admit that, if not for you, I would now be dead back in Normandy.”