And that was where they dragged him. He was given a small mallet and told to break up the chunks of rock someone dumped in front of him. In his relief that he had been spared the mine, Akitada worked away at this chore with goodwill. He was far from strong, but the activity required little strength, just patience and mindless repetition. When he finished one batch, a worker would remove the dust and gravel and replace them with more rock chunks. He saw no silver veins in any of the chunks he broke up. There were some small yellow spots from time to time, but he was too preoccupied with his body to wonder much at this.
He ate and slept where he worked. His legs were hobbled at the ankles even though he was unable to walk. When he wished to relieve himself, he dragged himself behind some bushes and then crawled back. On the next day, a guard forced him to stand. To Akitada’s surprise, he could put a little weight on his right leg again and, when poked painfully in the small of his back, he took the couple of staggering steps to the shrubs without screaming. All that was left from his injury was a stiff, slightly swollen, and bruised knee and an ache whenever he attempted to bend it.
They allowed him another day in the sunlight and fresh air before they sent him into the mountain. It was not a good moment for heroics. He was surrounded by hard-eyed guards, variously armed with whips, swords, and bows, and marched to the cave entrance, where they slung an empty basket over his shoulders by its rope and pushed him forward. In front of him and behind him shuffled other miserable creatures, each with a basket on his back. A break from the line was impossible.
The darkness received him eagerly. Air currents pushed and pulled as he shuffled in near-blindness in a line of about ten men following a guard with a lantern. They went down a steep incline, past gaping side passages, turning this way and that until he lost all sense of direction or distance. The rock walls closed in on him, and the tunnels became so narrow that he brushed the stone with his shoulders, and so low that he had to bend.
Panic curled in his belly like a live snake, swelling and choking the breath out of him until he wanted to turn and run screaming out of that place, fighting his way past the men behind him, climbing over their bodies if need be, clawing his way back to the surface, because any sort of death was better than this.
But he did not. And after a while, he could hear the hammering again, and then the tunnel opened to a small room where by the light of small oil lamps other miners chipped pieces of rock from the walls with hammers and chisels. He stood there staring around blankly, his body shaking as if in a fever. The empty basket was jerked from his back, and a full one put in its place. Its weight pulled him backward so sharply that his legs buckled and he sat down hard. A guard muttered a curse and kicked him in the side. Someone gave him a hand, and he scrambled to his feet. His bad knee almost buckled again. He sucked in his breath at the sudden pain. One of the other prisoners turned him about, and he started the return journey.
They carried the broken chunks of ore to the surface, where others dealt with them while they plunged back into the bowels of the mountain for another load. Kumo, for whatever reason, had spared his life to condemn him to a more ignominious and much slower end. As he trudged back and forth, he thought that he, Sugawara Akitada, descendant of the great Michizane and
an imperial official, would finish his life as a human beast of burden, performing mindlessly the lowest form of labor, the dangerous and unhealthy work the drunken doctor had tried to spare him, and he knew now he would not survive it for long.
Two facts eased his panic. The smoke from the earlier fire had cleared and the air was relatively wholesome. The mine also seemed a great deal cooler than he remembered from the weeks he had spent in his grave. The other fact concerned his right leg. He still limped and felt pain in his knee, especially when he put strain on it carrying his load uphill, but the swelling was gone and he had almost normal movement in it again. In fact, activity seemed to be good for it.
But he was still very weak and the rocks in the basket were abysmally heavy. The rag-wrapped rope, which passed in front of his neck and over his shoulders, cut into his flesh, and he had to walk bent forward to balance the load. This, added to the steep climb back out, strained his weakened muscles to the utmost. The first trip was not too bad, because he was desperate to get back to the surface, but on the second one he fell. To his surprise, the man in front of him turned back to help him up, telling him brusquely to grab hold of his basket. In this manner, the other man half dragged him up the rest of the way into the daylight.
When Akitada had unloaded and looked to see who his benefactor was, he was startled to recognize him. The man’s name escaped him for the moment, but he knew he was one of the prisoners from the stockade in Mano, the silent man with the scarred back. Their eyes met, and Akitada thanked him. The other man shook his head with a warning glance at the guards and started back into the tunnel. Akitada followed him.
He would not have lasted the first day if the man with the scarred back had not pulled him up on every trip to the surface.
Even so, Akitada sank to the ground after his last trip. He was too exhausted to notice that the sun had set and it was dusk. His companion pulled him up, saying gruffly, “Come on. It’s over.
Time to rest.”
Akitada nodded and staggered to his feet, heading toward the trees where he had spent the past nights. But the guard gave him a push and pointed his whip after the others who went back into the mine. So he was to spend even his nights underground again. Akitada almost wept.
They gathered in the larger cave by the light of a single smoking oil lamp. The prisoners sat and lay wherever there was room. Akitada found a place beside his benefactor. Someone passed food and water around. He drank thirstily, but his stomach rebelled at the sight and smell of food.
“Better eat,” said the man with the scarred back.
Akitada shook his head. Then he said, “Haseo. Your name is Haseo, isn’t it?”
The other man nodded.
“I’m sorry you ended up here.”
Haseo lowered his bowl and looked at him. “So did you.
Almost didn’t recognize you.”
“My own fault. I was careless.”
An understatement. He had made many careless errors, had thrown caution to the wind, had followed every whim, thought-less and mindless of obligations and prudence. His punishment was terrible, but he had brought it upon himself.
The other man gave a barking laugh. “I suppose that’s true of all of us.”
Akitada looked at the others, so intent on their food that few of them talked. They were here because they had been careless of the law, of the rights of their fellow men, and of their loved ones. He had not broken any laws, but he, too, had failed. He thought of Tamako. She would never know that he had betrayed his promises to her with Masako, but he knew and was being punished for it. If his mind had not been preoccupied with his affair, he would surely not have made the foolish mistakes that led to his capture. He had known that Genzo was treacherous, yet he had left his precious identity papers and orders unattended for hours, no, days, all the while congratulating himself for having so cleverly eavesdropped on the conspirators.
“What’s funny?” asked Haseo.
Akitada started. He must have been smiling-bitterly-at his own foolishness. “I was thinking of my carelessness,” he said.
Most of the prisoners were already settling down to sleep, and the single guard was arranging himself across the tunnel that led to the outside in case anyone attempted to run away during the night. Then he blew out the oil lamp and plunged them all into utter darkness.
Akitada tensed against the terror. His fingers closed convulsively around sharp bits of gravel. Any moment, he knew, he must scream or suffocate. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Sleep,” Haseo whispered.
Akitada took a long, shuddering breath. “Is there any chance of getting out of here?” he whispered back.
Haseo sighed. “Whereto?”
“It doesn’t matter. I have to get out of this mine.”
“They’ll catch you fast enough and you’ll be ten times worse off then,” Haseo hissed.
Akitada thought of the man’s horribly scarred back. “It’s a chance I’ll take. There’s nothing here but certain death.” Haseo said nothing for a long time. Then he muttered, “Go to sleep. You’ll need your strength tomorrow. I can’t drag you behind forever.” He turned his back to Akitada and lay down.
