“I ween you’ve been in touch with your uncle’s people-the miners.”
“How did you know this?”
“Why, it’s obvious that the devaluation of gold had great import for anyone running a copper mine in Nippon.”
Gabriel Goto, seemingly shocked at having been found out, said nothing. They had entered into the Queen’s apartments and were pursuing her down a gallery. She was deep in conversation with Enoch Root, but Jack got the impression that during the pauses, when Dappa was translating, Enoch was cocking an ear towards them.
Gabriel went on: “Since your inexplicable and new-found interest in Nipponese currency fluctuations is so marked, then, Jack, I shall warn you that it is all very complicated. The shogun has actually made several devaluations, trying to draw more metal from the ground and increase the supply of money, which in his view will bring about a corresponding increase in the amount of goods produced. Or so it seems from a miner’s perspective-which, after all, is the only perspective available to me.”
They were ascending a stone staircase, working against a current of cooler salt air. “Tell me of more complications,” Jack said.
“You probably imagine my people still working the same land that we were bequeathed many centuries ago. But we lost that land as part of the evolutions I spoke of, and my surviving relatives fled generally northwards, to be closer to the smuggling ports, and farther from Edo. Edo has a million people now.”
“It is impossible for a city to be that large.”
“It is the largest city in Creation, and no place for Christians.”
They had gained the top of the stairs now, and were crowding into a chamber that opened onto a balcony. From the rail of this balcony-the highest part of the palace-they could look down the vine-and flower-covered cliff below and out across the inlet where most of the Queen’s pirate-fleet rode at anchor. The ships seemed to float in mid-air, such was the transparency of the water, and underneath them schools of bright fish maneuvered through coral formations.
“Behold!” said the Queen, sweeping out one bangle-covered arm. Actually she said something in Malabari, but obviously it meant “Behold” and Dappa did not bother with a translation.
A peculiar sort of cargo-handling operation was under way down below: two pairs of small boats, each pair lashed together abeam of each other with logs spanning the gap between them. One of these makeshift catamarans was following several lengths behind the other, and the distance between them was bridged by a colossal tree-trunk, spoke-shaved smooth, and painted barn-red.
Jack heard Dappa speaking in English to Enoch Root: “Normally I would not be so presumptuous as to proffer advice to you on any subject, least of all manners and protocol-but I urge you, sir, not to ask the Queen where she obtained that mast.”
“I accept your counsel with gratitude,” said Enoch Root.
It was obvious that the mast had just been brought in by one of the Queen’s fleet: a frigate of European design. She was the largest ship in the harbor, but much smaller than the one being built on the beach in Dalicot, and so the mast dwarfed her-it was longer than the frigate’s deck, and must have projected forward and aft before it had been unlashed and let down onto those boats.
The boat-crews were paddling toward the shore as gamely as they could, though half the men were laboring with bails; gouts of water flew from the boats in all directions and slapped the surface of the harbor, only to rush back in over the gunwales during the next swell. Jack wondered whether he was about to witness a disaster, until he heard men in the boats, and on the shore, laughing.
Then he turned his attention back to Gabriel Goto. “But if your family are reduced to Vagabonds, how comes it they know so much of currency devaluations-and how do they write you letters on fair-looking rice-paper?”
“The short answer is that they remain bound to the same ancient Wheel, which has not ceased to turn.”
“The shogun wants metal to come from the ground-and in order to make it so, the House of Mitsui needs your cousins and nephews.”
“That is not the only thing on the shogun’s mind. In the far north, the Russians are on the move. Mostly it has been adventurers and fur-traders, ranging from outposts in Kamchatka, the Kurils, and the isles of the Aleuts. But there is a new Tsar in Russia named Peter, a man with a formidable reputation, who has even traveled to Holland to learn the art of shipbuilding-”
“I know all about this Peter,” said Jack. “Jan Vroom worked by his side, and Peter wanted him to come to Russia and build ships there. But Vroom saw the prospect of more profit, and warmer climes, in the offer of van Hoek.”
“In any event,” said Gabriel Goto, “Peter’s fame has reached the court of the shogun. Obviously Russia will one day threaten Nippon from the north. When that day arrives, Nippon will be defenseless against Peter’s Dutch-style ships and al-jebr-trained gunners, unless we are well established in northern Honshu and on the vast island to the north-a wilderness full of blue-eyed savages, called Ezo, or Hokkaido.”
“So your family may be doubly useful to the shogun. You can mine copper, and you have an interest in moving northwards.”
Gabriel Goto said nothing, which Jack took to mean yes.
“Tell me-has the shogun’s concern about this military threat led him to relax his ban on firearms?”
“He imports books of rangaku, which means ‘Dutch learning,’ so as to keep abreast of developments in fortifications and artillery. But the ban on guns will never be lifted,” said Gabriel Goto firmly. “The sword is the symbol of nobility-it is what marks a man as a Samurai.”
“How many Samurai are there in Japan?”
Gabriel Goto shrugged. “Their proportion to the entire population is somewhere between one in ten, and one in twenty.”
“And there are a million souls in Edo alone?”
“That is what I am told.”
“So, between fifty and a hundred thousand Samurai in that one city-each of whom must possess a sword?”
“Two-the long and the short. Many have more than one set, of course.”
“Of course. And is watered steel as desirable there as it is everywhere else?”
“We may be isolated, but we are not ignorant.”
“And where do the sword-smiths of Nippon get this kind of steel?”
Gabriel Goto inhaled sharply, as if Jack had strayed into the middle of his garden and left muddy foot-prints in the white gravel. “This is a great secret, the subject of legends,” he said. “You know that most Japanese are Buddhists.”
“Of course,” said Jack, who hadn’t known.
“Buddhism came from Hindoostan. And so did some of our other traditions that are very ancient-such as tea…”
“And steel,” Jack said, “which for centuries has been imported, by the finest swordsmiths of Nippon, from India, in the form of small egg-shaped ingots with a distinctive cross-hatch pattern.”
For once Gabriel Goto was openly dumbfounded. “How did you come to know this!?”
Down below, the narrow end of the giant mast had plowed into the beach. One pair of boats was being abandoned by drenched rowers. The other group was thrashing the water, trying to wheel the trunk around so it could be rolled up onto dry land. At a glance it seemed not to be moving at all. But move it did, as slowly as the minute-hand of a clock-as steadily as that mysterious Wheel that Gabriel Goto was always speaking of.
“You want to return to this homeland that you have never seen,” Jack said. “It could hardly be more obvious.”
Gabriel Goto closed his eyes and turned towards the Laccadive Sea. The onshore breeze blew his long hair back from his face and made his kimono billow like a colorful sail. “When I was a boy standing at my father’s knee and watching him paint his pictures of the Passage to Niigata, he told me, over and over again, that Nippon was now a forbidden land to us, and that the places he was drawing were places I would never see. And that is just what I believed for most of my life. But let me tell you that when I stood in Saint Peter’s, in Rome, waiting to kiss the Pope’s ring, I looked up at the ceiling of that place, which was magnificently adorned by a painter named Michelangelo. Not in Latin, English, or Nipponese are there words to express its magnificence. And that is the very reason for its being there, for sometimes pictures say more than words. There is a place in that painting where the Heavenly Father reaches out with one finger toward Adam, whose hand is outstretched as I am doing here, and between the fingertips of the Father and the Son there is a gap. And something has leapt across that gap, something invisible, something that not even Michelangelo could portray, but anyway it has crossed from the Father into the Son, and the Son has been awakened by it, and been infused with awareness and purpose. At the moment that I stood there in Saint Peter’s and saw all of these things, understanding suddenly came into my mind, bridging the gap of miles and years that separated me from my father, and I became aware for the first time. I understood that even though with his words he had forbidden me to return to Nippon, in his pictures he had told me that one day I must return-and in those same pictures he had given me the means.”