briefly, dragging charred timbers or carrying baskets of equipment. The cleanup had begun.
As the daylight grew stronger, he saw that his knee was still swollen and the tight skin was an ugly black and purplish red.
But the cooling rain had soothed the throbbing, and after a while Akitada began to test his leg. He could move foot and ankle easily, but the knee was too stiff to bend more than a little.
Still, he was encouraged that it would heal in time.
The remaining convicts were fed and put to their normal tasks. Half-naked, childlike figures with small baskets scrambled up the cliff and, one by one, disappeared into the badger holes, from which they reappeared after a while, bare buttocks first, dragging out baskets of chipped rock. The baskets were passed to the ground, where other convicts took them down the slope toward a curious wooden rig. This appeared to be some sort of a sluice carrying a stream of water down a gentle incline. Two men walked a treadmill that raised buckets of water from a stream to the top of the sluice.
Armed guards watched seated workers who used stone mallets to crush the rock chips into coarse sand before emptying that into the sluice. Now and then a worker would lift a traylike section of the wooden sluice to pick through the debris caught in it before reinserting it for the next batch of ground rock.
Akitada watched this, trying to account for the amount of effort expended on rock. He had never seen such a time-consuming and inefficient method of mining. No wonder the emperor saw so little silver from Kumo’s operations.
Toward noon there was an unpleasant interruption. A horseman trotted to the center of the clearing, stared at the smoky cave opening, then shouted, “Katsu.” One of the guards appeared from the mouth of the cave, ran forward, and bowed.
“The master’s displeased,” the rider barked. “This is the second time in one month. You are careless. How many this time?” The guard bowed several times and stammered something, pointing to the corpses.
“Three? Well, you won’t get any more. Put everybody to work. Guards, too. Your last take was disappointing.”
“But we’re running out of good rock. Just look. We had to make six new badger holes.”
The horseman slid off his horse and together they went to the cliff and looked up. The new arrival was short and had a strange, uneven gait. They stood and watched as one of the miners backed out of his hole and lowered his basket to the ground. The newcomer reached in and inspected its contents, shaking his head.
Akitada could no longer hear what was said, but the horseman seemed familiar. He had heard that voice before. Then it came to him that it had been in Kumo’s stable yard. This was Kita, the mine overseer who had arrived with bad news that night. Another fire.
But he was unprepared for what happened next: Kita turned his head and Akitada saw his profile. Kita was the bird-faced man who had followed him to Minato and later to the monastery. He would have recognized that beaky nose anywhere. Then the overseer turned fully his way, shading his eyes to see better, and asked a question. When the two men started purposefully toward him, Akitada knew that his troubles were far from over.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Tora and Turtle returned to his sister’s hostel, they found several excited children waiting anxiously at the door.
Apparently they looked forward to sharing the remnants of the dinner the generous guest had paid for.
Tora was no longer very hungry after the noodle soup but did not want to seem unappreciative of Turtle’s sister, whose name was Oyoshi, and asked the whole family to join him. An amazing number of children appeared instantly. They all sat down on the torn and stained mats of the main room, the children in their gay, multicolored bits of clothing lined up on either side of their mother, three girls to one side, five boys to the other. She served Tora and her brother first, steaming bowls of rice covered with vegetables and chunks of fish. An appetizing smell filled the room. Tora sampled, while the children watched him fixedly, licking their lips. The food was quite tasty and he said so, inviting the others to join them. To his discomfort, Turtle’s sister served only the little boys. She and the little girls had to wait until the men had eaten their fill.
Nevertheless, it was a cheerful gathering, with Turtle chattering away and the children giggling. But when Turtle mentioned their run-in with Wada earlier that day, his sister suddenly burst into such vicious invective that even he stared at her.
“Why, what’d he do to you?” he asked when she ran out of terms of abuse.
“Not me, you fool. Little Flower. She was near to dying on the street when I heard. I brought her here this morning.” Turtle’s eyes grew large. “Amida. Not again! And just now.
I should have known bad luck was coming when that crow cawed at me.”
“Who’s Little Flower?” Tora asked.
“She’s the whore I told you about,” said Turtle, looking apologetic. “Wada’s girl. They call her that because she’s sort of small and pretty. He likes them that way.”
“Well, she’s not feeling very pretty now,” his sister snapped.
“That bastard!”
“Damn,” said the Turtle. “I didn’t know. But if she’s laid up, maybe he’s got somebody else. I can find out.”
“More fool she,” muttered his sister, refilling a boy’s bowl while three little girls watched hungrily. Only the baby, lashed to its mother’s back, was uninterested in the food and stared with unblinking eyes at Tora over its mother’s shoulder. He wondered where the children’s father was. Having tended to her sons, Oyoshi looked sternly at her brother. “You stay out of it, Taimai. He’d kill you as soon as slap at a fly.”
“Could I talk to this Little Flower?” asked Tora, pushing his half-filled bowl toward the little girls.
Their mother snatched it away and divided the contents among the boys. Men came first in her household. Having reestablished the sacred order, she turned a gap-toothed smile on Tora and said, “A strapping officer like you doesn’t want a pitiful little flower. Let me fix you up with a real beauty for the night, Master Tora. Only fifty coppers, and you’ll feel like you’ve been to paradise.”
Her wheedling tone was familiar. Tora had heard such propositions before and was not too surprised that Turtle’s sister also worked as a procuress. People did what they had to do in order to feed a large family. He grinned. “But I like them little and bruised,” he teased.
Her smile faded. She had begun gathering the various leftovers for herself and the hungry girls, but now paused to look at Tora dubiously. “Well, she needs the money, but . . . you aren’t planning to beat her? Because, I tell you, I won’t have it.
She can’t take any more.”
Tora flushed to the roots of his hair. “No. I was joking. I don’t beat my women. I just want to talk to her, that’s all.”
“Just talk? Hmm,” she muttered, frowning at him. “Well, I’ll go and ask her.” She left the little girls watching tearfully as one of the boys helped himself to several juicy bits of fish.
When their mother returned a moment later, Tora insisted that she let the girls eat now and watched as they fell on their food like small savages. Then he followed her to the back of the hostel.
This part of the building looked worse than where Tora’s room was. The walls leaned at odd angles, water had leaked in and stained them black, and doors did not shut properly or were missing entirely. Here and there whole boards were gone, put to use in other places. He glanced into empty rooms, each no more than a tiny cubicle, hardly large enough for two people to lie down together, and passed others, inadequately covered by ragged quilts pinned up in the doorway, where he heard the grunts and squeals of lovemaking. Oyoshi opened the last door and said to someone inside, “Here he is, dear. Mind you, you don’t have to have him.”
Tora ducked into a dark space. In the dim flicker from his hostess’s oil lamp, he made out a cowering figure in one corner.
“We’ll need a candle,” he said.
