Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 18

CHAPTER IX

THEY found themselves that night, Adams and Santvoort, living life on the old terms again—puzzling over means and testing obstacles to an end that was desirable and clear. It was only, they thought, their dumbness that blocked them utterly. To the soldiers roosting on the foredeck while Adams and the Dutchman sat aft, they went and said, "Mitsu, Mitsu." It was the name—or nickname, or title—by which they had heard their interpreter-escort addressed at Osaka. With him they felt they could make some headway against the absurd impotence whereby at present they could gain only paper napkins and melons and radishes.

"Mitsu, Mitsu," they demanded.

From the soldier in apparent command they got what seemed to be some sort of reassurance, some indication that all would be well—if, indeed, it was not well already. (They had not yet discovered that the Japanese soldier had only one tone and one gesture for predicting future events, regardless of whether the event was to be fulfilment of his dearest wish or his immediate death.)

The next day they spent in brooding and chafing and looking idly ashore for their Portuguese-talker of the day before. But his features had dissolved into the similar features of a hundred or a thousand others. A man beckoned them again to the little house where the other had startled them with his talk, but they found nothing there but wine and laughter. The talker of the day before had given an air of secrecy to himself, so they attempted no enquiries. Laughter for its own precious sake had little appeal for them at the moment, so they merely glanced into the house and passed on.

It was at the cargo itself that Adams did most of his grumbling now—bales upon bales of Dutch broadcloth which was, of all the things he could think of, the most unlikely to find buyers. . . . Likelier wares would have been the things that had been stolen from the ship, things which they themselves must now either buy or make. Santvoort said there was small hardware stowed somewhere in the hold, and somewhere, too, with the broadcloth, were rolled sheets of lead. They knew already, however, that the art of theft depended here less on the visibility of objects and the movement of thieves than on some mystery. Things were not taken away; they just vanished. And so, without a sheltered and enclosed and locked place wherein to unlade and guard the cargo, they could not start a hunt for the knives and nails and axe-heads and pots and sheets of lead that might produce money for them, where an armful of moth-eaten broadcloth had left the bazaar's hucksters cold and idiotic, and themselves with a brace of melons and a bunch of radishes.

The following morning, when he went up on deck he stopped, as though stunned by his astonishment, and then shouted down the companion:

"Melchior! He's here!"

This sudden information could mean only one thing; and the Dutchman came lumbering up. The two of them in a moment were shaking the hands of Mitsu from Osaka.

"Man! Why didn't you wake us?" Adams burst the question out in English first, and then forced it into Dutch.

"I too had need of sleep, An-jin," Mitsu said; and then, "only the fool would wrestle with time."

"A fool—or anyone with feet as well cooled as ours are," said Melchior.

"Yes," said Adams. "Now, thank God, we can move. We will sell our cargo now and get for it—money."

"You have no need to sell things—for money, An-jin," Mitsu replied. "I myself have brought money for you, and given it in trust to the Lord of this place. Fifty pieces. It is yours whenever you have need of it."

"Need of it!" Adams exclaimed. "Man, the ship is stripped naked. We have need of all the money we can get to fit her for sea again."

"The Shogun's guests have no need of a ship ready for sea," said Mitsu. Then his tone became less formal. "An-jin," he said, "for you there is no use in a ship ready for sea. You are a—guest."

"Guest be damned—" said Adams. "Go on, Melchior—tell him we've a cargo to sell and a ship to make good. Then we're off."

The answer to the Dutchman's statement was, "His Lordship's message is the gold he has sent for your comfort. In his heart is friendship; in his girdle, and mine, and in the girdles of a thousand thousand others—swords. This is the word he sends you, An-jin, with his benevolent greetings."

Adams saw the object vanishing from life again, as though a cable mooring them to its firm solidity had suddenly parted. The parting did not, however, leave them adrift but stuck. They were ringed about by ring within ring of things impenetrable, incomprehensible and intangible.

The outermost ring of all was mountains that chopped the blue lid of sky into a disc with a fanged, jagged edge. The innermost was now, not the amiable smile and meaningless chatter of the foreshore throng, but—closer than this—the score and more of protruding sword hilts.

The flicking of a head from its shoulders by the blade of the Justice of the Peace for some trivial crime in Oita was a sight less unusual than the tipping of rubbish from a barrow; for rubbish was left to rot and stink in the crazy streets. The trial, upon the corpse, of new blades in the hands of young bloods or of old blades repaired or newly edged, made of every lithely decorated hilt a possibility to be recognised among the facts of life.

"Guests-" snorted Adams. "Guests indeed! Here, regard me, Mitsu. We came as we came. And so we will go."

"In this?" asked the Jap. His smile was at the stumps that were left of mast-houndings, at the sagging deck-house and the sprung seams.

A mumble was sufficient to express the thought of Adams.

Mitsu continued, solemnly: "Now you, An-jin, regard me. You have no ship. Any man who would carry you—if any such could be found—would be cut before he had carried you a league. Friendship is offered to you. Take it in good part. More than friendship no man may gain from another."

"Friendship——" snorted Adams. "It's prisoners he's made of us. Just like the dogs de Conning and Owater. Are they, too, his friends?"

"They were your enemies," said Mitsu. "How could they be his friends?"

"Why does he keep them, then?" asked Adams.

"He does not keep them," said the other. "They were of no worth."

"Has he killed them?"

Adams stared, surprised at the thought now that he had come to consider it so flatly by itself.

"They," said the other, and he shrugged his shoulders at the triviality, "were of no worth. No worth whatever."

"Hear that, Melchior?" said Adams.

"Aye," said Santvoort, "but the padre, Mitsu? He, too, is of no worth."

"Padres," said the Jap, "are a different pair of sandals."

The question of the padre was one which Adams and the Dutchman had often discussed, finding no particular answer.

"What are padres to the Emperor?" Adams asked. "Is he a believer in their teaching? Are you?"

"He is a believer in men," said Mitsu. "As for me, I am his servant. Beliefs of padres and priests are no concern of mine. My sole concern is whether they are his friends or his enemies, for a man may not live under the same sky as his Lord's murderer or in the same town as his enemy."

"So the padre is his friend?" Adams displayed some contempt in his question.

"Between enemies and friends," Mitsu explained, as glibly as though he were quoting from a book of rules, "there is the multitude of all the world. It is of no account. No more than the myriad of dust-grains between two footfalls. It is the ground beneath the foot only that is of consequence."

"All very fine," said Santvoort. "But those two rascals of ours did no worse than the padre with his dirty lies. He started it, Mitsu—and yet they, you say, have been done for."

"In the padre's conduct," said Mitsu, "there was policy. In theirs was nought but fear and greed."

"Call it spite, not policy," said Santvoort. "For why, in God's name, should he have wanted us stuck up and spiked on those crosses of yours?"

"He is a priest, not a soldier," Mitsu spoke now as though merely making a suggestion and not quoting obvious truth, or a rule. "Priests think deviously and not straight. It may have been because, though even whiter and hairier than himself, you do not believe in his God. Priests give great importance to such matters; but he had neither enmity nor greed nor fear."

"And who told you we do not believe in his God?" demanded Adams.

"It is well known," was the answer. "It is given out by him and all of the Portingals. Spaniards, too, say that in your country and the Hollander's you have denied the God, and burnt up his temples and destroyed his images; stealing the gold. So they have declared you pariah; and you, in your turn, have turned to sea-robbery and murder for a living."

"God Almighty!" said Adams. "And you believe any of that? You and the Emperor?"

"How should a man believe or disbelieve what is of no consequence? But remember this, my friends——" He grinned as he remembered the way these two had exploded at the padre in the chamber of leyasu. "Remember this. The Law is law for all—even for his Lordship's friends. The penalty for a sword drawn with any purpose but the cleaning or the testing of the blade, is death. His Lordship's guests must have no brawls. If they seek justice against another they must seek it from his Lordship himself, not by means of enmity and personal quarrel."

"Justice!" said Adams. "Is it justice to make prisoners of honest men with letters of friendship to him from their nation?"

"How prisoners?" the Jap demanded a little peevishly. "Have I not said 'guests'—and again 'Guests,' and—'Guests'? You have safety and food; and money now, and entertainment even by women."

"Let his Lordship keep his money and his entertainment and his women," said Adams. "We'd have money of our own—and entertainment—and women—if you had not made prisoners of us—you with your bellyful of sword-hilts and your cant of friendship and justice. If there is any justice, let us see the Emperor again and have it. Let us tell him our case and make him let us go."

"When his Lordship has leisure again for such matters you shall indeed see him," said the other. "In the meantime let not your necks grow heated."

"In the meantime," said Adams, "if there is any way of going, we will go."

With this defiance he snapped the conversation to an end and stumped off to tell the Captain that they had got no further.