Autumn Bridge (36 page)

“Stop struggling,” he said to her. “It’s over.”

His men surrounded Emily but stopped short of seizing her. His orders had been to take Hanako without harm and leave Emily to him. Because he himself had taken Hanako and had done nothing about Emily, his men could not do as he had said. Without specific orders, they were befuddled by the changed circumstances. They had been trained since childhood to obey without question. Little emphasis had been put on taking the initiative, which implied a lack of competence on the part of the leader who had issued orders incapable of fulfillment.

Their hesitation was compounded by Emily’s status. Until a few minutes ago, they had been treating her with the greatest deference because of her long-standing relationship with Lord Genji and the role she had played in the fulfillment of earlier prophecies. The sudden shift to thinking of her as an outsider who had to be sacrificed was far too abrupt for them. The unsettled night they had spent at Mushindo did not help. The eerie sounds, compounded by the numerous rumors and legends associated with the place, had more than a few of them seeing and hearing things that were not there. No one wanted to be the one to strike Emily down. It was up to Taro.

He said, “Here, hold Lady Hanako.” As his men moved to obey, a large rock slammed down onto Taro’s right foot. The sudden pain made him lean out of balance just as Hanako tried to twist out of his grasp. He fell, still holding on to her. The brat, Kimi, raised the rock to strike again, but had to dive away when one of his men slashed at her. The first cut barely missed her. The second did nothing but mow down tall grass. She was gone.

The fall loosened Taro’s grip just enough. Hanako’s sword was still in her hand. She shifted her angle just enough and thrust the sword backward as hard as she could into Taro’s torso. The blade went in deep beneath the floating rib.

“Ah!” Taro drew back from her.

Hanako pulled the blade out of Taro, thrust it into the man nearest her, and slashed her way toward Emily. Since the men had been ordered not to harm Hanako, they could do nothing but retreat as she advanced.

“Lord!” His men moved to assist him.

“Stand away!” Taro said.

His blood drenched his clothing. He pressed his hand against the wound. His internal injuries were serious, but he was able to stanch the outward flow of blood. They were back where they had started, surrounding Emily and Hanako, with Hanako, sword in hand, ready to kill and die. Except that in a few minutes, he had lost
six men. To an opposing force composed of an outsider woman, a brat, and the one-armed wife of his best friend.

Enough.

Taro got back to his feet.

He ignored the intense pain. His injury could well be mortal. If he fell without killing Emily, the entire plan would fail before it began. She had to die, no matter what the cost. He stepped toward the two women.

“Lady Hanako,” he said, “do not sacrifice yourself for nothing. What will your son do without his mother?” He hoped his words would distract her enough for his men to surprise her. He knew nothing he said would weaken her resolve.

Hanako held her sword with the point aimed straight at Taro’s eyes. She said, “He will be a loyal samurai, like his father, and he will die an honorable death. A reward you have denied yourself.” Emily could not be hurt! Lady Shizuka had prophesied that she would bear Lord Genji’s child. If this did not happen in the proper way, who knew what tragic consequences would result? Hanako shifted constantly from left to right, trying to keep all of her opponents within her field of vision.

With a cry of surprise, one of Taro’s men dropped to his knees. He put his hand to his head. It came away bloody. He was having trouble focusing his eyes.

A second flung stone split the flesh of a second samurai’s cheek.

The third barely missed Taro himself.

“Very good, Goro,” Kimi said, “very good.”

“Kimi,” Goro said, picking up another stone.

“Remember, if they chase us, run as fast as you can for the Mushroom Hot Spring,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m small. I can hide in the grass.”

“Kimi,” Goro said.

“Goro,” Kimi said.

Goro threw the stone. He was amazingly accurate at the range of fifty paces. In the days before he began imitating monkish ways, he used to kill rabbits for his mother. She was an idiot, too, like Goro. That was the only reason the fervent Buddhists in the village didn’t ostracize them for killing fellow sentient beings, which violated Buddha’s Law. Since they were idiots, they had already been ostracized. There was one thing Goro’s mother could do better than normal people, though. Cook. Her rabbit stew in particular was incredibly delicious. Now that he was pretending to be a monk, Goro didn’t kill anything anymore. Since his mother died, nobody made rabbit stew, either. Not that there was anyone bringing a whole lot of rabbits into the village since Goro stopped stoning them, anyway.

Now that the traitorous samurai saw Goro, they were ducking out of the way. The stone throwing was still a good tactic, since it kept them from continuing their advance on the two ladies. How could they turn against Lord Genji? When Kimi was a little girl, she and all the other children in the village had watched the famous battle. Hundreds of musketeers surrounded him and fired hundreds and hundreds of bullets at him, bullets that were still found in abundance all over the ruins of Mushindo. Not one hit him. Of course not. How could a bullet hit a lord who knew the future? He would simply not be where the bullets would go.

Kimi would ordinarily never dare to talk back to samurai, much less clout them with rocks. But this was different. She was helping Lord Genji. Lord Genji always won. He could see the future, so no one could ever defeat him. No doubt he had foreseen this treachery and had already taken steps to crush the traitors. He might arrive at any time at the head of a column of his famous cavalry, banners flying, the blades of the long lances sparkling, loyal samurai calling out his name as a battle cry. What a splendid sight that would be.

Of course, Lord Genji’s triumph might occur in a completely different way, a way she could never imagine. How did that famous saying go? The old folk in the village always repeated it when they were trying to seem wise. Ah, yes.

Lord Genji said, The foreseen always occurs in unforeseen ways.

The old folk claimed to have heard him say it after the battle, when his few had defeated the Sticky Eye’s many. She wondered if that was true. Unlike most in the village, Kimi had actually seen Lord Genji up close, and she had heard him speak. It was just casual conversation she’d eavesdropped on, nothing deep and profound. But personal experience had given her some insight into his character. She thought it more likely that he would have smiled that odd little smile of his and said something funny, nothing so weighty and old-folksy as the words attributed to him.

“Aim for that one holding his side,” Kimi said.

“Kimi,” Goro said.

“Goro,” she said.

“Kimi,” he said, and threw the stone.

“Stop dodging about like fools,” Taro said. “Use your bows. You — shoot down that stone-throwing idiot. And the brat. You — kill the outsider woman.” He would have shot Emily himself, if the wound in his side had not made it impossible. “Take care not to hit Lady Hanako by mistake.”

“Lord,” the two men said. They pulled arrows from their quivers, nocked them, and drew their bows.

Several samurai were waiting outside the gates when Charles Smith arrived. He was on horseback, since Genji had suggested a morning ride. All of the men bowed deeply to him as he dismounted. One of them took his reins and, still bowing, said something in Japanese, which Smith took to be an assurance that his mount would be looked after with great care.

“Thank you,” Smith said, bowing in return. He did not know much about Japan or the Japanese, but he assumed that courtesy would always be understood, even when words were not. The secondary gate was opened and the samurai bowed again, their leader indicating to Smith that he should proceed first. The main gate was used only when Lord Genji arrived and departed, or when lords of high rank visited him. Smith took no offense. Ancient cultures tended to be rigidly attached to their traditional practices. When those practices were destroyed or abandoned, the culture, too, inevitably succumbed.

It had happened to the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru when the Spanish arrived. When the English and the French reached North America, it had happened to the Huron and the Mohegan and the Cherokee, and was happening even now to the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the Apache. When his own ancestors arrived in the Hawaiian Islands at the turn of the century, there were a million Hawaiians harvesting rich crops of taro, fishing in abundant seas, and practicing a religion of gods and taboos that dictated a balance and harmony between nature and society. Today, they were barely a tenth that number, decimated by diseases brought by Americans and Europeans, demoralized by the failure of their gods, and near extinction and annexation. What was happening in the New World was happening in the Old as well. The Russian army was crushing the Tartars and the Kazakhs, the last remnants of a Mongol empire that once ruled the better part of two continents, from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic and the Black Seas. The British and the French, and even the Dutch, were carving Africa into their imperial possessions. In Asia, India was inexorably being absorbed into the British Empire. Britain, France, and Russia all had their eyes on China. And after China, could Japan be far behind? The Japanese were a warrior society, but so, too, had been the Incas and the Aztecs, and they had fallen. The Japanese were a great population, upwards of forty million, but India and China were far greater, and they were falling. The Japanese were not susceptible to unfamiliar diseases the way the Hawaiians were, but they were armed with swords and spears and a few old muskets, while the Western Powers possessed an abundance of the deadliest weaponry science could produce. For the Japanese, modern warfare would be as deadly as a pestilence against which they had no resistance.

The natural law that Charles Darwin had discovered applied to men and nations as well as jungle animals. Only the fittest survive.

Smith knew this. He knew the Japanese were doomed, so he was not offended by their overweening pride or their unconcealed disdain. It was no more than the ignorance and conceit of ghosts who did not yet realize they had already passed away.

Their demise was as inevitable as the rising of the sun. The civilizations of the East had unquestionably been great in their day. To know this, one had only to look upon the Taj Mahal, or the Great Wall of China, or the towering Golden Buddha at Kamakura. Smith had seen each of these places with his own eyes, and so he knew. But that day of Eastern greatness was long past. India, China, Japan, and all the rest were static societies, intent on an unchanging stability, the great ideal of the East. They had no concept of progress, and thus would be swept away by it. It was not really a matter of steam power, cannons, armies, or armadas. It was, as in everything human, a matter of belief. The West believed the golden age of mankind lay ahead. The East believed it lay in the past. That made all the difference.

He felt no particular antagonism toward the Japanese, despite the virulently anti-Western attitude of most of their leaders. They could not escape the embrace of a stagnation and degeneracy that had been tightening for centuries. It would be more accurate to say rather that, in addition to a natural sense of superiority, he felt sympathy, as any civilized man must for those facing extinction. And of course he had no antagonism toward Genji personally. Indeed, he rather liked the man. He did not relish the fact that Genji was doomed in the long run. He simply saw reality and accepted it. It was quite poignant, because Genji was at heart very progressive. He was among the few Japanese advocating the adoption of Western knowledge and methods on a large scale. But it was too little, too late. In many respects, Japan was where Europe had been five hundred years ago. Five centuries could not be made up in the time Japan had before it would be overwhelmed. By the turn of the twentieth century, a little more than three decades hence, Japan, like the rest of the Oriental world, would be under the heel of a Western power. The only matter in doubt was which. With the right administration in Washington, it could be the United States. And why not? Who was to say that the imperatives of Manifest Destiny ceased at the western edge of the North American continent? The Mediterranean had been a Roman lake in the age of the Caesars. Why should the Pacific not be an American lake in the present one? There was no reason that Smith could see.