Toru: Wayfarer Returns (Sakura Steam Series Book 1)

by Stephanie R. Sorensen

  “There is another way.” Tōru trailed off. He knew from his reading and visits to West Point other great armies had also faced this moment. He knew how outraged they had been, the French and Prussian and British noble and aristocratic officers who had traditionally commanded. “We can train commoners to fight with the new weapons, in the new airships, and submarines and train cars. They aren’t allowed to carry swords, but I can teach them to pilot airships and fire guns.”

  This time Aya raged. “No. Never. Your swords and Lord Shimazu’s strange demands concerning you are going to your head, fisherman. We are not arming commoners. For two hundred and fifty years, the Shogun has kept the peace by entrusting arms only to those worthy of trust. I may not like the Bakufu and the Shogun’s many errors and weaknesses, but this ancient policy is for the safety of all and the peace of the entire realm. We who are warriors for a thousand years know how to bear this responsibility, and we alone. Do not speak to me of this again.”

  Tōru persisted. “I’ve run the calculations—“

  “Don’t speak to me of calculations. This is honor. This is our sacred trust, for centuries.”

  Tōru gestured imploringly to his host and mentor. He could not back down, even if it enraged Lord Aya. “We cannot raise a force sufficient to meet and repel the foreigners by next year unless the Shogun joins us and orders everyone to join us. He will not.”

  “True, the Shogun would rather die than act.” Lord Tōmatsu looked unhappy, but he grasped the cold math. The sounds of shouting workmen and the clanging hammers of the carpenters filled a long pause. “We could have commoners serve under samurai officers. In the crews. Not the fighting parts, just the crews of the, what do you call them, dirijibi? The flying ships? And the underwater ships.” He sniffed distastefully at the idea of going underwater in a small ship crammed with commoners.

  “I considered that, sir, but in actual battle, even a ship’s cook must be able to use his weapon and help the ship sail and maneuver. We would have to include commoners, many commoners, to fill out all the crews and squads we need. And you would want the most able men in command. Not just those,” Tōru hesitated, for he was pushing into unthinkable ground now, “of great birth.”

  Tōmatsu laughed. “Absurd. Don’t worry so much, fisherman. We know how to fight. Trust us to manage this small part of your grand plan. One of my samurai is worth fifty of your American barbarians.”

  Aya roared again. “You would put commoners in command over samurai? Are you mad?”

  “I would sir, for specialized functions, and for any role they understand best, like the steering of the airships or the tending of the engines. The nobles and the samurai are the best officers for direct combat on land,” Tōru continued hastily, “as they already understand the discipline and tactics of fighting together. Many of them can read so they can send and receive telegrams and intelligence. But you would want the best commanders in charge, regardless of birth, even in the army. No matter how you organize them, and how brave they are, we simply need more men. Able men. Commoner men.”

  Tōru paused, letting this sink in. He had a long list of additional arguments, but he knew they would have to understand and agree on their own. For their answer, until and unless they saw his logic for themselves, was that samurai were warriors and everyone else was not. So it had always been and always must be.

  “Never. We will not discuss this madness further. We are late getting underway. Leave the generalship to us, boy, and go build the factory you promised us.” Lord Aya mounted his horse and signaled for Lord Tōmatsu to move out with him, trailing a splendid long line of fully armored retainers in their wake, glorious in their 17th century armor and fine swords.

  1852 Summer

  CHAPTER 6

  ALLIANCES

  “We cannot live only for ourselves.

  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men;

  And among those fibers, as sympathetic threads,

  Our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”

  – Herman Melville

  While the Lords Tōmatsu and Aya galloped around the countryside rallying other western daimyōs to their cause, Tōru and Masuyo focused on building their operation, aided, more than anyone had ever expected, by the indefatigable Jiro.

  Jiro quickly proved both his worth and his prodigious capacity for drink and song. He was a great favorite among the workmen. Foulmouthed, strong as an ox, surging around from dawn to past dusk directing his army of engineers, blacksmiths and swordsmiths, he never tired nor ceased to sing, shout and tell jokes, except for the moments he took to chug a swig or three of cheap saké.

  Masuyo, unconventional though she was, was nobly born and gently raised. She had never been around such a man, loud and uncouth and irreverent. Her father’s servants always treated her like a fragile china doll.

  Jiro was another matter altogether.

  He treated Masuyo with exaggerated but sincere respect in his exuberant and unpolished way. Once over his shock at being commanded by a woman, even a woman of rank, he would do anything for her, going far beyond her requests to meet the demands of the goals underneath. Stiff and formal at first, shocked by his irreverent ways and peasant language, Masuyo eventually accepted the jovial blacksmith as a partner. Testing him with an unending series of new demands for equipment and gear, she discovered that Jiro did not know failure, but rose to each new challenge, presenting her each day with new offerings.

  Masuyo saw Jiro was practical and hardworking, a near-constant slow infusion of saké notwithstanding. Hesitant at first, she began to joke with the wise-cracking blacksmith. Soon Masuyo and Jiro were fast friends, to Tōru’s consternation. Within days, she was doing credible imitations of Jiro’s hard-bitten peasant accent and telling barbarous stories with his wit and rhythm while hurling low-class slang around like a pirate.

  Tōru watched Masuyo’s transformation with some alarm. He feared Lord Aya would blame him for inflicting Jiro’s unique and exuberant style on her.

  Masuyo shrugged off his concerns. “You keep saying it is a new world and we must change to meet it. I like Jiro! He is more intelligent and hardworking than most of the nobles I know. Look what he is able to do! The men all love him. Tōru, he is your secret weapon, more powerful than even your beloved dirigibles and sewing machines!”

  “But, my lady! You cannot behave—behave like a blacksmith!” For a revolutionary, Tōru was pretty conservative. The loud aggressive American women had frightened him. Masuyo’s transformation he found even more terrifying. His mother had been graceful and feminine, the epitome of traditional femininity and beauty. Masuyo stomping around in men’s boots and hakama and swearing in the construction pit with Jiro made Tōru’s head spin.

  “You sound like my father, fisherman.”

  To Tōru’s astonishment, Masuyo stuck out her tongue at him, a gesture he had never seen in his life, even in America. She laughed and told him, “You ought to be happy I get along with Jiro so well! He works hard for me. Between the two of us, we have found all the workers you are demanding! Jiro is gathering them now.”

  Jiro was true to his word. Messengers had been sent out to all the blacksmiths he recommended. Bewildered blacksmiths from a dozen villages were duly fetched and their daimyōs compensated for the loss of their services. Swordmakers, too, he knew and recommended, believing they could train apprentices to make parts for the first prototype guns. He recruited skilled carpenters for the constant building of new warehouses, factories and containers for all the products being created.

  Jiro was in his element, commanding the workmen. He was a natural leader, unpolished and crude, but universally beloved of his men. Here the carpenters raised barracks, there the blacksmiths cast parts. A collection of literate young men, mostly merchants’ sons handpicked by Jiro, became engineers, translating Masuyo’s drawings into detailed specifications for parts: for telegraph systems, for guns, for trains, for dirigibles and for Babbage Difference Engines
. Each afternoon, as the shadows grew long, the foremen and engineers gathered in a small school, learning to read and write and do calculations so they could understand and communicate engineering diagrams and plans. Other skilled workmen turned those detailed drawings into pilot parts to make molds for factory castings.

  Mystified at first at the strange summons, the young men eagerly took to their work, and the solid pay they could send to their families in a dozen poor villages. Word spread throughout the region of strange new technologies and an insatiable demand for the services of any young man, samurai or commoner, who could read and liked to work hard. Lord Aya’s quiet, out-of-the-way, country castle boiled with activity, an anthill disturbed by a stick, as Tōru, Masuyo and Jiro argued and planned and built all they needed to unite and defend the country.

  Late one overcast gray afternoon, Jiro stepped out of his muddy boots in the entranceway genkan and into the lab, where Masuyo could usually be found, bent over her plans and diagrams. For once he was not singing, swearing, swigging saké or acting out some madcap adventure to amuse his workmen.

  Rather he was uncharacteristically quiet as he slipped through the lab, piled high with half-finished projects and experiments, and made his way to Masuyo’s corner. Silently Jiro knelt near her, to be down at her level as she knelt at her low writing table. When she did not greet him, he coughed delicately. She started, and dropped her brush, blotting her page.

  “Oh, I am so sorry!” Jiro cried as he attempted to help Masuyo save her page of work.

  Masuyo shrugged off his help as she blotted up the mess. “I did not see you! No matter, it wasn’t right yet anyway. I’ll do it over and get it right.”

  Jiro paused, working out how to begin.

  Masuyo looked at him sidelong, sensing an unasked question hanging in the air.

  “Did the new plans explain the brake mechanism to your engineers clearly enough?” Masuyo rarely wasted time on small talk, not with all they had to get done.

  “The plans? Oh yes, they were fine. The engineers are building prototypes right now for testing.” Jiro hesitated again.

  Masuyo turned and faced him full on. “Jiro, is something the matter?”

  Jiro twisted and made a face. “Can you, would you, I mean, would it be possible for you to teach me to read?” Jiro’s question poured out of him in an urgent whisper, his voice low to avoid Tōru overhearing as he worked in his own corner of the newly built lab.

  Masuyo stifled a smile and nodded gravely, knowing what it had cost the swaggering, confident blacksmith to ask for help. “Of course. But I thought you did not wish to learn. Tōru said he tried to teach you when you were boys and you disliked it very much.”

  “Well, that was then, and now we have so much to do. I can see now how reading can be like fighting. To read and write is as interesting as to swing a blade, and might help us more.”

  Masuyo nodded. “Certainly. I fight with these dictionaries and diagrams every day. My father will never allow me to go into battle with pistol or naginata. But I would defend our shores with every breath in my body, so I fight with my pen and my brain.”

  Jiro bowed to the young woman, sincere respect in his motion. “Yes, my lady. I thought it…weak and unmanly to write. So I refused to learn. I am no poet, wearing silk and writing tanka under a full moon while sipping plum wine from tiny cups.” He hung his great head. “But you show me it is brave to fight with the dictionaries. I would not have a—a woman be braver than me. We must defeat the dictionaries if we are to win against the foreigners.”

  Masuyo laughed. “Yes, we must conquer the dictionaries, and soon. Especially the French ones that frustrate Tōru so! But would you not prefer to learn from Tōru, your friend from so long ago?”

  Jiro leaned in, his swagger and good cheer returning. “If you would not mind, I would rather learn from you. Tōru is, well, he is terrible at teaching. He is my friend, my best friend, so please don’t tell him I told you this, but he doesn’t know how to explain things. Everything comes easily to him, so he doesn’t know how to teach a blockhead like me.”

  Masuyo laughed out loud, her peal of laughter making Tōru look up from his work to see what was going on. She waved Tōru back to work, composed herself and leaned back in to Jiro and whispered, “Of course I will teach you. You are no blockhead, Jiro, but one of the best fighters we have. We should not let Tōru’s poor teaching skills get in the way of your learning. Let me find some books for us to practice with.”

  “And you won’t tell Tōru? I don’t want him to laugh at me.”

  Masuyo held back her smile and nodded gravely. “If you wish it so, then it is our secret. But he would not laugh at you, I am certain.”

  “Thank you. Can we start tomorrow? I’ll come early before Tōru arrives.”

  “Of course.” Masuyo smiled at the blacksmith as he arose.

  Jiro began to sing one of his favorite foulmouthed drinking songs. She joined in on the chorus, earning the pair of them a glare from Tōru across the crowded lab. Giggling, Masuyo jumped up, grabbed Jiro and steered him over toward Tōru, singing loudly. Masuyo and Jiro stomped and swirled and clapped their hands in a festival dance Jiro had taught her from Iwamatsu as they advanced on Tōru’s position in the far corner of their lab.

  Tōru sighed. He had been puzzling over the control mechanism design for the dragon dirigibles he wanted to build, a fleet of airships to defend the coasts from American warships. It would be the first military air fleet in the world. He was dazzled by the idea, but thwarted by the reality of actually building one.

  The French had built a few prototypes. American newspapers had followed their progress with excitement, breathlessly reporting on the adventures of the dashing airship captains. The pilots from those successful maiden voyages were feted all over Europe.

  No one had put airships to practical use yet, though, so his idea to use them as a protective force along the coast was innovative and controversial. His American military friends scoffed at dirigibles as a French fancy flourish with no real military use. “Fat flying targets, tasty as a Christmas goose flying overhead,” was how one American officer summed them up. Tōru was unsure what the officer meant by delicious Christian geese, but he grasped the scorn for the idea.

  Even if the dirigibles weren’t effective as actual weapons, Tōru hoped the airships would at least frighten the foreigners away on their first visit. He wanted to buy time to build more useful defenses. He needed weapons capable of sinking hardened warships, not merely frightening their crews.

  One thing at a time.

  Tōru pushed his work aside with a string of good solid oaths in English he had learned from the sailors on his return home. The dirigible designs he had brought from America were all in French, which was not nearly as similar to English as he had been led to believe. He lacked a good French dictionary, and ordering one through the Dutch traders at Nagasaki was out of the question. He was forced to crack a smile as his singing, dancing friends approached, though his head hurt with the mind-bending, frustrating work.

  He needed a break.

  Design work was how he relaxed these days, as a respite from overseeing the constant swarm of activity stirred up by Masuyo and Jiro as they built out the lab and barracks and factories. Usually designing things calmed him, but today, between the heat, the construction noise and the damnable French, design only added to the pressure and stress eating him.

  Tōru fantasized sometimes about running away from the whole mad process and actually becoming a fisherman somewhere, maybe up on the far northern coast among the primitive Emishi people, where nothing ever happened and no one of note ever came. Single-handedly organizing an industrial and military revolution while evading the Shogun’s men was not something he had actually envisioned doing, but here he was.

  The future train station was rising from the dust swirling around Lord Aya’s castle. All attempts at maintaining secrecy had long since been abandoned. Whenever he remembered how badly they were fail
ing at hiding their activities, Tōru had developed a nervous tic of rubbing the back of his neck where the executioner’s blade would fall if the Shogun’s men came asking questions. He rubbed his neck as he stood to greet his friends as they twirled to a stamping stop in front of his workspace.

  “What’s with all the noise? I’m trying to get some work done here.”

  Jiro and Masuyo exchanged looks and invented a reason for their interruption, one that had the added benefit of being true. Improvising as they went, they began talking over each other in their excitement, a habit they had recently picked up and refined until they spoke as one unit in two bodies.

  “Everything is taking too long,” began Masuyo.

  “We need more wood here, and faster,” continued Jiro.

  “We’re already out of coal and parts for the first shipment of rifles,” said Masuyo.

  “We’re out of everything, and no shipments are due until next week,” said Jiro. “Can’t get milk unless you feed the cow. Our supply lines have ground to a halt.”

  “You’ve got to get the trains built and in place. We’ll never meet plan unless we can get the materials here faster,” finished Masuyo. She sat down and idly examined Tōru’s drawing of the dirigible control mechanism. “You’ve got it wrong here. This needs to connect here, and here. Not here, as you have it. It will block the motion you need.”

  Tōru leaned in to see her suggestions. She was right. She usually was, a habit he found annoying. And oddly attractive.

  “We don’t have the materials or forges to build trains yet. We have to do them later,” Tōru insisted.

  “There won’t be a later unless we get the trains in place. There’s simply no way to move enough men and materials fast enough without the trains. We’ve run the Babaji calculations to prove it.”

  Tōru sighed. He knew they were right. There were just too many problems, too many projects, too much going on to keep everything straight. But they were right, so what to do?