"Igurashi-san. You'll travel by night and maintain strict security."
"Yes, Lord."
"This is to remain secret, Mura, or the village will be obliterated."
"Nothing will be said, Lord. I can speak for my village. I cannot speak for the journey, or for other villages. Who knows where there are spies? But nothing will be said by us."
Next Yabu had gone to the strong room. It contained what he presumed to be pirate plunder: silver and gold plate, cups, candelabra and ornaments, some religious paintings in ornate frames. A chest contained women's clothes, elaborately embroidered with gold thread and colored stones.
"I'll have the silver and gold melted into ingots and put in the treasury," Zukimoto had said. He was a neat, pedantic man in his forties who was not a samurai. Years ago he had been a Buddhist warrior-priest, but the Taiko, the Lord Protector, had stamped out his monastery in a campaign to purge the land of certain Buddhist militant warrior monasteries and sects that would not acknowledge his absolute suzerainty. Zukimoto had bribed his way out of that early death and become a peddler, at length a minor merchant in rice. Ten years ago he had joined Yabu's commissariat and now he was indispensable. "As to the clothes, perhaps the gold thread and gems have value. With your permission, I'll have them packed and sent to Nagasaki with anything else I can salvage." The port of Nagasaki, on the southernmost coast of the south island of Kyushu, was the legal entrepot and trading market of the Portuguese. "The barbarians might pay well for these odds and ends."
"Good. What about the bales in the other hold?"
"They all contain a heavy cloth. Quite useless to us, Sire, with no market value at all. But this should please you." Zukimoto had opened the strongbox.
The box contained twenty thousand minted silver pieces. Spanish doubloons. The best quality.
Yabu stirred in his bath. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck with the small white towel and sank deeper into the hot scented water. If, three days ago, he told himself, a soothsayer had forecast that all this would happen, you would have fed him his tongue for telling impossible lies.
Three days ago he had been in Yedo, Toranaga's capital. Omi's message had arrived at dusk. Obviously the ship had to be investigated at once but Toranaga was still away in Osaka for the final confrontation with General Lord Ishido and, in his absence, had invited Yabu and all friendly neighboring daimyos to wait until his return. Such an invitation could not be refused without dire results. Yabu knew that he and the other independent daimyos and their families were merely added protection for Toranaga's safety and, though of course the word would never be used, they were hostages against Toranaga's safe return from the impregnable enemy fortress at Osaka where the meeting was being held. Toranaga was President of the Council of Regents which the Taiko had appointed on his deathbed to rule the empire during the minority of his son Yaemon, now seven years old. There were five Regents, all eminent daimyos, but only Toranaga and Ishido had real power.
Yabu had carefully considered all the reasons for going to Anjiro, the risks involved, and the reasons for staying. Then he had sent for his wife and his favorite consort. A consort was a formal, legal mistress. A man could have as many consorts as he wished, but only one wife at one time.
"My nephew Omi has just sent secret word that a barbarian ship came ashore at Anjiro."
"One of the Black Ships?" his wife had asked excitedly. These were the huge, incredibly rich trading ships that plied annually with the monsoon winds between Nagasaki and the Portuguese colony of Macao that lay almost a thousand miles south on the China mainland.
"No. But it might be rich. I'm leaving immediately. You're to say that I've been taken sick and cannot be disturbed for any reason. I'll be back in five days."
"That's incredibly dangerous," his wife warned. "Lord Toranaga gave specific orders for us to stay. I'm sure he'll make another compromise with Ishido and he's too powerful to offend. Sire, we could never guarantee that someone won't suspect the truth - there are spies everywhere. If Toranaga returned and found you'd gone, your absence would be misinterpreted. Your enemies would poison his mind against you."
"Yes," his consort added. "Please excuse me, but you must listen to the Lady, your wife. She's right. Lord Toranaga would never believe that you'd disobeyed just to look at a barbarian ship. Please send someone else."
"But this isn't an ordinary barbarian ship. It's not Portuguese. Listen to me. Omi says it's from a different country. These men talk a different - sounding language among themselves and they have blue eyes and golden hair."
"Omi-san's gone mad. Or he's drunk too much sake," his wife said.
"This is much too important to joke about, for him and for you."
His wife had bowed and apologized and said that he was quite right to correct her, but that the remark was not meant in jest. She was a small, thin woman, ten years older than he, who had given him a child a year for eight years until her womb had dried up, and of these, five had been sons. Three had become warriors and died bravely in the war against China. Another had become a Buddhist priest and the last, now nineteen, he despised.
His wife, the Lady Yuriko, was the only woman he had ever been afraid of, the only woman he had ever valued - except his mother, now dead - and she ruled his house with a silken lash.
"Again, please excuse me," she said. "Does Omi-san detail the cargo?"
"No. He didn't examine it, Yuriko-san. He says he sealed the ship at once because it was so unusual. There's never been a non-Portuguese ship before, neh? He says also it's a fighting ship. With twenty cannon on its decks."
"Ali! Then someone must go immediately."
"I'm going myself."
"Please reconsider. Send Mizuno. Your brother's clever and wise. I implore you not to go."
"Mizuno's weak and not to be trusted."
"Then order him to commit seppuku and have done with him," she said harshly. Seppuku, sometimes called hara-kiri, the ritual suicide by disembowelment, was the only way a samurai could expiate a shame, a sin, or a fault with honor, and was the sole prerogative of the samurai caste. All samurai - women as well as men - were prepared from infancy, either for the act itself or to take part in the ceremony as a second. Women committed seppuku only with a knife in the throat.
"Later, not now," Yabu told his wife.
"Then send Zukimoto. He's certainly to be trusted."
"If Toranaga hadn't ordered all wives and consorts to stay here too, I'd send you. But that would be too risky. I have to go. I have no option. Yuriko-san, you tell me my treasury's empty. You say I've no more credit with the filthy moneylenders. Zukimoto says we're getting the maximum tax out of my peasants. I have to have more horses, armaments, weapons, and more samurai. Perhaps the ship will supply the means."
"Lord Toranaga's orders were quite clear, Sire. If he comes back and finds-" "Yes. If he comes back, Lady. I still think he's put himself into a trap. The Lord Ishido has eighty thousand samurai in and around Osaka Castle alone. For Toranaga to go there with a few hundred men was the act of a madman."
"He's much too shrewd to risk himself unnecessarily," she said confidently.
"If I were Ishido and I had him in my grasp I would kill him at once. " "Yes," Yuriko said. "But the mother of the Heir is still hostage in Yedo until Toranaga returns. General Lord Ishido dare not touch Toranaga until she's safely back at Osaka."
"I'd kill him. If the Lady Ochiba lives or dies, it doesn't matter. The Heir's safe in Osaka. With Toranaga dead, the succession is certain. Toranaga's the only real threat to the Heir, the only one with a chance at using the Council of Regents, usurping the Taiko's power, and killing the boy."
"Please excuse me, Sire, but perhaps General Lord Ishido can carry the other three Regents with him and impeach Toranaga, and that's the end of Toranaga, neh?" his consort said.
"Yes, Lady, if Ishido could he would, but I don't think he can yet - nor can Toranaga. The Taiko picked the five Regents too cleverly. They despise each other so much it's almost impossible for them to agree on anything." Before taking power, the five great daimyos had publicly sworn eternal allegiance to the dying Taiko and to his son and his line forever. And they had taken public, sacred oaths agreeing to unanimous rule in the Council, and vowed to pass over the realm intact to Yaemon when he came of age on his fifteenth birthday. "Unanimous rule means nothing really can be changed until Yaemon inherits."
"But some day, Sire, four Regents will join against one - through jealousy, fear or ambition - neh? The four will bend the Taiko's orders just enough for war, neh?"
"Yes. But it will be a small war, Lady, and the one will always be smashed and his lands divided up by the victors, who will then have to appoint a fifth Regent and, in time, it will be four against one and again the one will be smashed and his lands forfeit - all as the Taiko planned. My only problem is to decide who will be the one this time - Ishido or Toranaga."
"Toranaga will be the one isolated."
"Why?"
"The others fear him too much because they all know he secretly wants to be Shogun, however much he protests he doesn't."
Shogun was the ultimate rank a mortal could achieve in Japan.
Shogun meant Supreme Military Dictator. Only one daimyo at a time could possess the title. And only His Imperial Highness, the reigning Emperor, the Divine Son of Heaven, who lived in seclusion with the Imperial Families at Kyoto, could grant the title.
With the appointment of Shogun went absolute power: the Emperor's seal and mandate. The Shogun ruled in the Emperor's name. All power was derived from the Emperor because he was directly descended from the gods. Therefore any daimyo who opposed the Shogun was automatically in rebellion against the throne, and at once outcast and all his lands forfeit.
The reigning Emperor was worshiped as a divinity because he was descended in an unbroken line from the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, one of the children of the gods Izanagi and Izanami, who had formed the islands of Japan from the firmament. By divine right the ruling Emperor owned all the land and ruled and was obeyed without question. But in practice, for more than six centuries real power had rested behind the throne.
Six centuries ago there had been a schism when two of the three great rival, semi-regal samurai families, the Minowara, Fujimoto and Takashima, backed rival claimants to the throne and plunged the realm into civil war. After sixty years the Minowara prevailed over the Takashima, and the Fujimoto, the family that had stayed neutral, bided its time.
From then on, jealously guarding their rule, the Minowara Shoguns dominated the realm, decreed their Shogunate hereditary and began to intermarry some of their daughters with the Imperial line. The Emperor and the entire Imperial Court were kept completely isolated in walled palaces and gardens in the small enclave at Kyoto, most times in penury, and their activities perpetually confined to observing the rituals of Shinto, the ancient animistic religion of Japan, and to intellectual pursuits such as calligraphy, painting, philosophy, and poetry.