The Samurai's Daughter (38 page)

At the Military Academy everyone was far too keyed up to study. Nobu was promoted to officer cadet and issued with a Snider and spent his days at the firing range, learning to manipulate the heavy rifle until he was on target every time. There were regular manoeuvres, grand heart-stirring events when the soldiers lined up in their thousands and presented arms, marching and wheeling in perfect unison to the sound of the French drill masters’ barked orders:

‘
Attention! En avant – marche!
’

‘
Sur le pied droit, halte. Repos!
’

They’d paraded through the city in their splendid uniforms, rifles gleaming, while crowds lined the streets to watch.

With the chafe of rough wool on his neck, hearing the shouts and the stamp of boots, Nobu felt home and dry. At the barracks, every moment was accounted for – reveille at dawn, roll call, uniform inspection, drill, breakfast, and so on through the day. He didn’t have to worry about money or where he would live or how he would find the next meal; and there was not a single spare moment when he had a chance to stop and reflect, to brood about Taka and Jubei’s death and the terrible events of the summer. He obeyed orders and that was all. It was best that way, best to lose himself in the daily routine of army life. Thinking only brought pain and confusion.

Then on 11 April came the call Nobu had been waiting for. Along with his classmates he packed his kitbag, tied a jaunty red blanket on top and an extra pair of shoes, one on each side, put on his uniform, overcoat and cap, strapped on his sword and picked up his rifle, and boarded the train for Yokohama, carrying himself tall and proud. There he lined up at the jetty along with thousands of others to be ferried out to the towering Mitsubishi troopship.

Along with everyone else Nobu had spent his first days on board laid out on his pallet, groaning and retching with every pitch and lurch of the ship. But as soon as he found his sea legs he was back at work. While most of the others spent the voyage drinking, gambling and grumbling, he cleaned his rifle every day and occasionally fired a few shots to make sure it stayed in good working order. For the rest of the time he pored over his textbooks, boning up on French military tactics. All his training was soon to be put to the test and he wanted to be sure he was good and ready.

‘These coves say they know you.’ Sakurai loomed over him, casting a huge shadow, as he propelled a short, bow-legged fellow into the cabin. Grumbling, Nobu’s fellow cadets cleared a way as the man stumbled in, tripping over their kitbags and bedrolls. ‘Conscripts,’ Sakurai added, wrinkling his nose. ‘The gods know
when
this one last had a wash.’ One of Sakurai’s sidekicks, Sato, hovered in the doorway, holding a second man by the scruff of the neck.

The conscripts had the stunted, undernourished look of townsmen or peasants. They were wearing ill-fitting, crumpled uniforms with sleeves that dangled below their wrists, and they shifted awkwardly from foot to foot as if they weren’t used to leather boots.

All the officer cadets thought of conscripts as a lower order, almost another species. Nobu had heard very little good and a lot of bad about them. He knew the army was desperate for manpower in the face of the southern threat and was using the new conscription law to round up thousands of raw recruits; but, as the officers knew all too well, the new men were virtually useless. They were there under duress, they were untrained, but above all they were not samurai; they lacked fighting spirit, they were not ready to die, as samurai were. By all accounts they’d proved no match for Kitaoka’s veterans. Most ended up getting cut down straight away. He’d heard that in the heat of battle many were so nervous that they shoved two bullets into their rifle instead of one and the rifle blew up in their hands when they pulled the trigger.

‘Conscripts? I’m not acquainted with any conscripts,’ Nobu grunted. Sakurai was needling him again. The only course was to humour him until he lost interest and went away.

Sakurai’s prisoner gave a strangled squawk. ‘No …’

‘Shut your mouth. Who told you to speak?’ Sakurai whacked the man around the head. ‘Caught them snooping around outside, looking for something to nick, most like. I was about to give them a thrashing when this worm starts mouthing off. Looking for Nobu, he says, Nobuyuki Yoshida. Old friends, he says. Likely story, I thought, but you never know, what with our Yoshida’s dubious origins. What do you say we give them a good beating, teach them some respect?’

The bow-legged man was struggling, flapping his arms, trying
to
break free of Sakurai’s unyielding grip. ‘No … Nobu, it’s us, your old mates.’

Nobu stared at him, startled. He knew that cocky Edo chirrup. ‘Bunkichi! Zenkichi!’

He threw down his book and sprang to his feet in delight. The last time he’d seen them had been back at Mori’s, at the end of the summer holidays. They’d been apprentices then, with shiny shaven pates and oiled topknots, in cotton jackets and leggings. Now their hair had grown in on top and been chopped off into a ragged fringe, making their faces broad and square instead of egg-shaped; but he recognized those ugly mugs all the same. He remembered trailing along the main boulevard of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters with them while Mori-
sama
swaggered on ahead, and sleeping squashed together in the servants’ quarters at Mori’s meagre house.

‘Bunkichi and Zenkichi, grooms at Mori-
sama
’s. We worked together. Leave them be!’

‘You certainly have odd friends, Yoshida,’ drawled Sakurai, looking down his crumpled nose with a sneer.

‘Not grooms no more, we ain’t, nor coves neither.’ Bunkichi thrust out his scrawny chest as Sakurai released him. ‘Privates, if you don’t mind. Private Kuroda and Private Toyoda, fifth division, second battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment, at your service.’

‘Kuroda? Toyoda? Since when did you have surnames?’ said Nobu, laughing.

‘Always ’ave ’ad. Trouble with you, young Nobu, is you never gives us the respect we deserves. Thought you’d seen the last of us, didn’t you? We’re not so easy to get rid of. Isn’t that right, Zenkichi?’ He scowled at Sakurai. ‘Bloody samurai, think you’re so high and mighty. We can handle a rifle good as anyone. I’ll show you one of these days.’

‘Townsmen? With rifles? You wouldn’t even know which end to hold,’ snarled Sakurai. ‘I’d watch it, Yoshida, wasting time with conscripts. It won’t look good on your report. Shouldn’t you be on mess duty?’ He strode off, Sato at his heels.

*

Nobu glanced around the airless cabin at his fellow cadets, squashed shoulder to shoulder, staring blank-eyed at the new arrivals with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. He could smell their bodies and feel their collective misery.

‘Let’s go on deck,’ he said. ‘I could do with some fresh air.’

‘Are we allowed up there?’ Bunkichi asked nervously.

‘With me you are.’

The officers lounging around the corridors and the grand staircase looked at them curiously as they brushed past.

Nobu leaned over the railing, hearing the roar and rush of water and the creak and clatter of the paddle wheel as the ship cut through the waves. There was a gentle swell, no more. Above them the furled sails flapped and banged in the wind. Steam poured from the funnel.

He took a breath, enjoying the smell of sea air and the feel of wind on his cheeks. The water was iridescent and the sky bluer than he’d ever seen. Even the light was different, sharp and clear. The crags lining the coast were a tangle of green, with the purple and blue cones of volcanoes shimmering mistily behind. Seagulls swooped and shrieked.

‘Give me dry land any day,’ shouted Bunkichi. He and Zenkichi were keeping well away from the railing, eyes screwed up, big work-roughened hands shading their eyes. They looked distinctly uncomfortable, like creatures of the shadows who belonged in small smoky rooms in the narrow alleys of the townsmen’s district, as if all their dark secrets would be revealed in the glaring sunlight.

Nobu grinned. ‘So how’s Mori coping without me?’

‘That Mori. “Not taking no more students,” says he after you left. “Eat my food, never do any work, come and go as they please any time of day or night …” He found a new servant soon enough, though. You know what they say. “Can’t take a step without …” ’

‘“… treading on a servant.”’ Nobu was back in the wooden
house
near Kaji Bridge, remembering Mori’s pouchy face and kimonos stinking of tobacco, the trips to the bathhouse, washing out his loincloth, the regular humiliations … No matter. The job had served its purpose, it had tided him over the summer and he’d been able to give money to his brothers too.

Other memories bobbed up, memories he’d done his best to erase – the meetings with Taka, Jubei’s dreadful death. He’d thought he’d buried those memories for ever but here they were rising to the surface again. He grimaced and shook his head.

‘So there I was, thinking I was going to be with that bastard till I was old and bent.’ Bunkichi seemed to have regained his confidence. His large mouth cracked open in an expansive grin and he leaned forward with a conspiratorial air. ‘Then what do you know, there’s a knock at the door and it’s some official, all dressed up in western togs – jacket, trousers, the lot.’ He pushed his chin out and screwed his face into an officious scowl. ‘ “From the Ministry of War, I am,” says ’e. “Lookin’ for one Kuroda.” “Kuroda?” says I. “No such person ’ere.” I’m rackin’ my brains, trying to think what I’ve done wrong; or maybe it’s young Nobu, I think, in trouble again, maybe he wants us to bail ’im out.

‘Seems they’ve been making a record of every fellow in the country and Mori told them we worked for him. They asked ’ow old we were and he told them, “Twenty.” Don’t know where he got that figure from; you’d have to dig up my old ma and ask her, she’s the only one knows for sure. “I’m not twenty,” I says. “Not me. Eighteen if I’m a day.” This official, ’e says, “Look near enough twenty to me. You gotta pay blood tax.” “Blood tax?” says I. “It’s my blood you wants, is it?” ’

‘You know perfectly well what blood tax is,’ said Nobu, grinning. ‘It means you’ve been called up, my friend, you’ve got to join the army. No one wants your blood.’

‘You should hear what they’re saying down the bathhouses – they’re draining conscripts’ blood to make wine for those blood-guzzling foreigners. Don’t worry, we don’t believe that stuff, we’re not simple-minded. Anyway, Zenkichi tries to do a runner, heads
over
the wall at the back but they’ve stationed policemen there with those long hooks of theirs.’

Zenkichi elbowed Bunkichi out of the way. ‘They hooks me right through the obi. It was an expensive obi, too. They drags us over to the barracks, gets our clothes off, gives us a physical, then it’s off with our topknots and on with these uniforms. All we have to do is march up and down, they says, and we gets our pay and our meals. Didn’t sound bad – not at first, anyway. And guess what?’ He cocked his head, narrowed his eyes to slits and gave a knowing smile. ‘Turns out the girls will do anything – anything – for a fellow in uniform. On Sundays we takes ourselves down the Yoshiwara. No need to risk a dose of the clap at some cheap joint any more. Anything you like, no charge, says the girls.’

Bells rang and whistles sounded. The ship was veering around the headland, tacking closer to the coast.

‘Then just as we’re thinking life can’t get any better, suddenly it gets worse, much worse. We’ve barely settled in there when they puts rifles in our hands and packs on our backs and shoves us on to the train. Next thing we know we’re down the docks. And here we are, off to teach the Satsuma a lesson. That’s what they tells us, anyway.’ Bunkichi’s bony shoulders drooped and his scrawny chest deflated. His cockiness had completely evaporated. ‘Can’t say I’m looking forward to being at the sharp end of a Satsuma sword. I’ve no quarrel with the Satsuma. Why should I die for something I don’t know anything about?’

Nobu slapped him on the shoulder. ‘And there I was thinking you were the tough one. I thought you liked a bit of a brawl. In the army we don’t ask questions, we just do as we’re told.’

‘We’re not samurai,’ wailed Bunkichi. ‘We’re townsmen. We’re not made for fighting.’

‘The Satsuma are the enemy,’ Nobu said, dutifully reciting the official line. ‘They want to overthrow the government. If they get their way the whole country will be a battlefield again.’

He pictured the burnt-out ruins of Aizu Castle and the graves of his mother, his sisters, his grandmother, lined up on a bleak
windswept
hillside. He could never forget that sight, it was seared in his memory for ever. ‘The Satsuma have done terrible things,’ he added with conviction. He knew from his own experience it was true. ‘They need punishing. Though from what I hear, sadly there won’t be much fighting where we’re going.’

‘We don’t even know where that is. They don’t tell conscripts nothing.’

‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ Nobu hesitated. The three of them went back a long way. There was no harm in them knowing. ‘Kagoshima. We’re going to Kagoshima.’

Across the water the hills undulated, a great curtain of green, wild and rugged, an impassable mass of foliage. Nobu wondered uneasily how their northern troops would fare in such an alien land.

Bunkichi gulped and his pockmarked face turned the colour of rice porridge. He opened and closed his mouth like a frog. ‘Not … the Satsuma capital? But that’s … We’re putting our heads in the hornets’ nest!’

Nobu smiled wryly. ‘No such luck. From what I hear it’s undefended. There’s just women and children and townsmen there, hardly a samurai left. We’ll be an occupation force, that’s all. We’ve fairly well finished off the Satsuma. They were hunkered down around Kumamoto Castle but we broke that siege and they’re on the run now. All that’s left is to mop up the stragglers and track down the leaders. I was looking forward to cutting down a few Satsuma myself. Shouldn’t think I’ll have much chance.’

He didn’t add that they had good intelligence that the Satsuma were racing to get back to the city before the army did. There was no need to fill these raw recruits with terror. They’d find out soon enough.