guttural language. If his guards knew that he was an official in the service of the emperor, they would have little pity for him.
He suddenly wondered if he was being kept alive because they planned to ransom him. Perhaps he would go home after all, home to hold his wife and child, home to breathe the clean air, home to become human again.
That hope brought such relief that he relaxed in spite of his miserable condition and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
But waking up in the same hot, stinking darkness cured him quickly of ridiculous hopes. He had forgotten Kumo, the man who had put him here, as well as the fact that no ransom payment would be made for him. His family certainly had nothing to trade for his life. And the imperial government would hardly raise a large amount of gold or trade territory for a junior official who had so signally failed in his assignment.
Knowing how powerful his enemies at court were, and how little his superiors thought of his ability, he doubted they would even negotiate on his behalf. So it would only be a matter of time before either Kumo or the Ezo got rid of him.
When the goblin and her companion brought his food, he looked at them more closely. Both creatures looked brutish, but they seemed indifferent to him as a person. There was no particular animosity in the way they treated him, just caution and dull obedience to orders.
In spite of an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, he ate.
Life was extraordinary. The more someone tried to crush it out of you, the harder you struggled to stay alive. There was neither honor nor pride in this persisting. Chained in the bowels of the earth, lying in your own filth, and lapping food from a bowl like a dog, you were nothing. Yet you clung to life.
One faculty distinguishes a man from a trapped animal: his reason. Akitada spent the waking hours thinking. What, for example, were Ezo doing working in this mine? They had been subjugated everywhere except in Hokkaido. Their presence lent some credence to the fears that had brought the imperial secretaries first to Sadoshima and then to him. Okisada and/or Kumo had formed some sort of alliance with the warlords of Dewa or Mutsu, strongholds of the subjugated Ezo. Their territories were only a short ship’s journey away. Aided by a rebel Ezo army and funded by Kumo’s wealth, the traitors could march on the capital to place their candidate Okisada on the throne. No doubt the Ezo lords had been promised whole provinces as reward for their help. Such an alliance had happened before when Koreharu had rebelled. It had taken decades to subdue the uprising.
But then the prince had died, and an extraordinary thing must have happened next. Kumo had apparently stepped into Okisada’s place. With Mutobe out of the way, he would take over the government of Sadoshima and from there join the rebel army and attack the northern provinces of Japan. He could hardly claim the throne by birth, but other possibilities were terrible enough. Because of his carelessness Akitada had failed to stop him. Even if, by a miracle, he survived this ordeal, and even if Kumo’s rebellion was crushed, there would be no future for him anywhere.
He fretted over his helplessness and became so discouraged that he stopped eating, and even the simple act of breathing seemed an intolerable burden.
It seemed particularly bad one night, or day, when he awoke, choking and gasping for air. After a moment he realized that he was breathing smoke, dense, acrid, throat-searing smoke. As if being buried alive were not enough, he was apparently about to be cremated alive.
But he was wrong. Just when he was about to give up the pointless struggle, they came for him.
They cut the ropes and dragged him out of his grave and back into fresh air, life, and time.
It was nighttime outside, a chill, wet mountain night with a slight drizzle falling. They dumped Akitada somewhere near a tree and ran back.
Akitada did not know this and, had he known, he could not have taken advantage of the perfect opportunity for escape. He wanted nothing but breath after breath of clean air. He lay on his belly on the wet ground, shaking with the sudden cold after weeks in his grave, and coughed in great wrenching spasms. The moisture in the air he gulped made him aware of a great thirst.
He was breathing water, he thought. He was drowning in sweet-smelling water. Pressing his face and lips into the rain-drenched moss, he sucked up the moisture and wished he could stop shaking and coughing, and just let himself float in the moist, clean air.
His coughing stopped after a while. He rolled himself into a ball against the chill and opened his eyes. In the light of torches and lanterns, men darted back and forth, their shadows moving grotesquely against the cliff face. Others lay about, inert or barely moving. He thought belatedly of escape, but collapsed after the first attempt to rise. After that he sat, staring around him, thankful for the air-much cleaner than any he had breathed in weeks, dizzyingly clean-and enthralled by the visual spectacle after all the time spent in darkness.
A fire in a mine is deadly not because there is much to burn.
Later Akitada was to learn that there were only the notched tree trunks the miners used to ascend and descend between shafts, and baskets and some straw and hemp rope to raise and lower the baskets, and the many small oil lamps and occasional torches with which they lit their way through the tunnels. A fire might start easily if oil was spilled on rope and somehow ignited, but it was the smoke that did the damage. The smoke had nowhere to go and seeped through the tunnels, choking the men.
Eventually Akitada thought of the filth caking his skin and took off the sodden rag of a shirt. Pressing it against the wet moss and then scrubbing himself with it was exhausting work, but he felt better afterward. Sitting there, stark naked in the chill mountain air, he looked around for something to cover himself with. No one paid attention to him. He crawled over to one of the still bodies. The man was dead, his eyes rolled back into his head and his face black with soot, but his clothes, a cotton shirt and a pair of short pants, were almost dry because he lay under a tree. Akitada managed to take the shirt and pants off the corpse and put them on himself. But the effort was all he could manage. He collapsed beside the dead man and fell into a brief sleep of exhaustion.
He woke when the goblin and her companion wrapped a chain around his waist and attached it to the tree. It was loose enough to allow short steps if he could have stood up. His hands were tied in front with rope, so that he was much more comfortable than in the mine. The corpse was gone, tossed on top of a couple others. Akitada spent the rest of that wet cold night leaning against the tree trunk, alternately shivering and dozing, too weak and tired to take notice of the dark figures milling about and the coarse shouts and cracks of whips.
The rain stopped at dawn when blessed light returned, a gray and filtered light here under the tree on a cloudy morning, but that, too, was a blessing, for his eyes were no longer used to sun. The goblin returned with a bowl of food. He ate it gratefully, sitting up and lifting the bowl to his mouth like a man instead of an animal. It took so little now to please him.
But the distinction between men and beasts began to blur again as he saw his surroundings. They were somewhere in the mountains, fairly high up. Before him was a wide, open space covered with rubble and stone dust and ragged creatures. Ahead rose a cliff perforated by many holes, some only large enough for a small animal to enter, some-like the one from which he had emerged and around which still hovered a slight smoky haze-large enough to drive an ox carriage through.
For a mine, it was a small operation. Akitada saw no more than fifty people. About a third were guards. Several of them were Ezo, bearded and wearing fur jackets, and all were armed with bows and swords or carried leather whips. Most of the miners wore few clothes, and chains hobbled their feet so they could only shuffle along. So much for Kumo’s gentle treatment of his workers, Akitada thought. Though these men had been condemned to hard labor for violent crimes, the number of armed guards seemed excessive, particularly in view of the convicts’ miserable and cowed behavior. Indeed, where would they run to on this island?
At the moment, they sat or lay on the ground, but already one of the guards was walking about, snapping a leather whip.
One by one, the men stood, chains clinking, heads hanging, arms slack. A few glanced toward the corpses, but nobody spoke.
Some of the miners were half naked, and several of the smallest had rags wound around their knees and lower arms like little Jisei. Akitada glanced up at the holes in the cliff face.
They must be the badger holes the doctor had talked about.
The guards rounded up the bigger convicts and marched them back into the smoking cave opening. They resisted briefly, protesting and gesturing, but the whip soon bit into their backs
and bare calves and, one by one, they disappeared into the earth. One of the guards followed but returned quickly, gasping and coughing, to wave another guard in. They took turns this way, but the convicts only reappeared
