Shogun - Clavell James - Страница 86

"Sodomy's an abomination, against all law! Ask your confessor!"

You're the one who's the abomination - you, Captain-Pilot, Mariko wanted to shout. How dare you be so rude and how can you be so moronic! Against God, you said? What absurdity! Against your evil god, perhaps. You claim to be a Christian but you're obviously not, you're obviously a liar and a cheat. Perhaps you do know extraordinary things and have been to strange places, but you're no Christian and you blaspheme. Are you sent by Satan? Sin? How grotesque!

You rant over normal things and act like a madman. You upset the Holy Fathers, upset Lord Toranaga, cause strife between us, unsettle our beliefs, and torment us with insinuations about what is true and what isn't - knowing that we can't prove the truth immediately.

I want to tell you that I despise you and all barbarians. Yes, barbarians have beset me all my life. Didn't they hate my father because he distrusted them and openly begged the Dictator Goroda to throw them all out of our land? Didn't barbarians pour poison into the Dictator's mind so he began to hate my father, his most loyal general, the man who had helped him even more than General Nakamura or Lord Toranaga? Didn't barbarians cause the Dictator to insult my father, sending my poor father insane, forcing him to do the unthinkable and thus cause all my agonies?

Yes, they did all that and more. But also they brought the peerless Word of God, and in the dark hours of my need when I was brought back from hideous exile to even more hideous life, the Father-Visitor showed me the Path, opened my eyes and my soul and baptized me. And the Path gave me strength to endure, filled my heart with limitless peace, released me from perpetual torment, and blessed me with the promise of Eternal Salvation.

Whatever happens I am in the Hand of God. Oh, Madonna, give me thy peace and help this poor sinner to overcome thine enemy.

"I apologize for my rudeness," she said. "You're right to be angry. I'm just a foolish woman. Please be patient and forgive my stupidity, Anjin-san. " At once Blackthorne's anger began to fade. How can any man be angry for long with a woman if she openly admits she was wrong and he right? "I apologize too, Mariko-san," he said, a little mollified, "but with us, to suggest a man is a bugger, a sodomite, is the worst kind of insult."

Then you're all childish and foolish as well as vile, uncouth, and without manners, but what can one expect from a barbarian, she told herself, and said, outwardly penitent, "Of course you're right. I meant no harm, Anjin-sama, please accept my apologies. Oh yes," she sighed, her voice so delicately honeyed that even her husband in one of his most foul moods would have been soothed, "oh yes, it was my fault entirely. So sorry."

The sun had touched the horizon and still Father Alvito waited in the audience room, the rutters heavy in his hands.

God damn Blackthorne, he thought.

This was the first time that Toranaga had ever kept him waiting, the first time in years that he had waited for any daimyo, even the Taiko. During the last eight years of the Taiko's rule, he had been given the incredible privilege of immediate access, just as with Toranaga. But with the Taiko the privilege had been earned because of his fluency in Japanese and because of his business acumen. His knowledge of the inner workings of international trade had actively helped to increase the Taiko's incredible fortune. Though the Taiko was almost illiterate, his grasp of language was vast and his political knowledge immense. So Alvito had happily sat at the foot of the Despot to teach and to learn, and, if it was the will of God, to convert. This was the specific job he had been meticulously trained for by dell'Aqua, who had provided the best practical teachers among all the Jesuits and among the Portuguese traders in Asia. Alvito had become the Taiko's confidant, one of the four persons - and the only foreigner - ever to see all the Taiko's personal treasure rooms.

Within a few hundred paces was the castle donjon, the keep. It towered seven stories, protected by a further multiplicity of walls and doors and fortifications. On the fourth story were seven rooms with iron doors. Each was crammed with gold bullion and chests of golden coins. In the story above were the rooms of silver, bursting with ingots and chests of coins. And in the one above that were the rare silks and potteries and swords and armor - the treasure of the Empire.

At our present reckoning, Alvito thought, the value must be at least fifty million ducats, more than one year's worth of revenue from the entire Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire, and Europe together. The greatest personal fortune of cash on earth.

Isn't this the great prize? he reasoned. Doesn't whoever controls Osaka Castle control this unbelievable wealth? And doesn't this wealth therefore give him power over the land? Wasn't Osaka made impregnable just to protect the wealth? Wasn't the land bled to build Osaka Castle, to make it inviolate to protect the gold, to hold it in trust against the coming of age of Yaemon?

With a hundredth part we could build a cathedral in every city, a church in every town, a mission in every village throughout the land. If only we could get it, to use it for the glory of God!

The Taiko had loved power. And he had loved gold for the power it gave over men. The treasure was the gleaning of sixteen years of undisputed power, from the immense, obligatory gifts that all daimyos, by custom, were expected to offer yearly, and from his own fiefs. By right of conquest, the Taiko personally owned one fourth of all the land. His personal annual income was in excess of five million koku. And because he was Lord of all Japan with the Emperor's mandate, in theory he owned all revenue of all fiefs. He taxed no one. But all daimyos, all samurai, all peasants, all artisans, all merchants, all robbers, all outcasts, all barbarians, even eta, contributed voluntarily, in great measure. For their own safety.

So long as the fortune is intact and Osaka is intact and Yaemon the de facto custodian, Alvito told himself, Yaemon will rule when he is of age in spite of Toranaga, Ishido, or anyone.

A pity the Taiko's dead. With all his faults, we knew the devil we had to deal with. Pity, in fact, that Goroda was murdered, for he was a real friend to us. But he's dead, and so is the Taiko, and now we have new pagans to bend - Toranaga and Ishido.

Alvito remembered the night that the Taiko had died. He had been invited by the Taiko to keep vigil - he, together with Yodoko-sama, the Taiko's wife, and the Lady Ochiba, his consort and mother of the Heir. They had watched and waited long in the balm of that endless summer's night.

Then the dying began, and came to pass.

"His spirit's gone. He's in the hands of God now," he had said gently when he was sure. He had made the sign of the cross and blessed the body.

"May Buddha take my Lord into his keeping and rebirth him quickly so that he will take back the Empire into his hands once more," Yodoko had said in silent tears. She was a nice woman, a patrician samurai who had been a faithful wife and counselor for forty-four of her fifty-nine years of life. She had closed the eyes and made the corpse dignified, which was her privilege. Sadly she had made an obeisance three times and then she had left him and the Lady Ochiba.

The dying had been easy. For months the Taiko had been sick and tonight the end was expected. A few hours ago he had opened his eyes and smiled at Ochiba and at Yodoko, and had whispered, his voice like a thread: "Listen, this is my death poem:

Like dew I was born

Like dew I vanish

Osaka Castle and all that I have ever done

Is but a dream

Within a dream."

A last smile, so tender, from the Despot to them and to him. "Guard my son, all of you." And then the eyes had opaqued forever.