“Let’s go find the samurai,” Jack said. And they did, passing in a few steps through the wee house he’d fabricated out of sticks and paper—or, to be precise, palm leaves. His swords—a long two-hander and a shorter cutlass—rested one above the other in a little wooden stand. Jack went over and peered at the longer of the two. It had come from the collection of an Algerian corsair-captain, but according to Gabriel Goto it had unquestionably been forged in Japan at least a hundred years ago. And indeed the shape of its blade, the style of the handle, and the carving of the guard were unlike anything else Jack had ever seen, which argued in favor of its being from what by all accounts was the queerest country on the face of the earth. But the actual steel of the blade was (as Jack had noted, and remarked on, in Cairo years before) marked with the same swirling pattern shared by every other watered-steel blade, be it a Janissary-sword forged in Damascus, a shamsir from the forge of Tamerlane in Samarkand, or a kitar from the wootz-vale.
Having confirmed this memory to his own satisfaction, Jack straightened up and turned around and nearly butted heads with Enoch Root, who was just in the act of noticing the same thing. To his great satisfaction Jack saw amazement on the alchemist’s face, followed by a few moments of what looked almost like fear, as he came aware of what it might mean.
“Let’s hear what the artist has to say for himself,” said Jack, and slid a translucent screen aside to reveal the flinty garden, and Gabriel Goto sitting with his back to them, holding a brush with an ink-drop poised on its sharp tip.
GABRIEL GOTO’S STORY
[AS NARRATED IN CLERICAL LATIN TO ENOCH ROOT]
“I have never seen Japan. I know it only from pictures my father drew, of which these are but miserable plagiarisms.
“From the others you have heard stories that are as complicated as a Barock church or Ottoman mosque. But the Japanese way is to be simple, like this garden, so I will tell my tale with as few brush-strokes as possible. Even so it will be too many.
“Those who have ruled Japan, be they monks, emperors, or shoguns, have always depended upon local knights, each of whom is responsible for looking after some particular piece of land—seeing to it that this land produces well and that the people who work it are orderly and content. Those knights are called Samurai, and as with the knights of Christendom, it is their responsibility to keep arms and to bear them in the service of their lord when called upon. My family have been Samurai for as long as we choose to remember. The lands for which we were responsible were of little account, being in a high cold stony place, and we were held in no special regard by others of our class.
“The story is related that an ancestor of ours had split his holdings between two sons, giving the paddies to his first-born and the rocks to the other. Each spawned his own branch of the family: one rich, dwelling in lowlands and distinguishing itself in wars, the other a clan of coarse mountain-dwellers, not known for their loyalty, but allowed to remain in existence because neither were they known for martial prowess.
“The tale of these two clans goes on for centuries, and is as fraught with complications as the history of Japan itself—someday when we are on a long sea-voyage perhaps I will relate more of it. What is important is that copper and then silver were discovered in the rocky uplands. This was about two hundred years ago, at a time when the shogun turned his back on the affairs of the world and went into retirement, and Japan ceased being a unified country for a very long time—like Germany today. All power fled from Kyoto to the provinces, and each part of the country was controlled by a lord called a daimyo, something like a baron in Germany. These daimyos clashed and strove against each other ceaselessly, like stones on a pebble beach grinding each other. Ones who met with success built castles. Markets and cities formed round their walls. Markets require coins, and so each daimyo began to mint his own currency.
“What it amounts to is that this was a dangerous time to be a warrior but an excellent time to be a miner. As my ancestors—being Buddhists—would have expressed it, the two clans were bound to opposite points of the Wheel, and the Wheel was turning. Those lowland warriors allied themselves with a daimyo who was not deserving of their trust, and lost two consecutive generations of males in battle. My ancestors—the uplanders—moved down from the mountains and into apartments in another daimyo’s castle, not far from Osaka Bay, near Sakai, which in those days was a free city devoted to foreign trade, like Venice or Genoa. This happened about a hundred and fifty years ago, which was the same time that the Portuguese began to come up from Macao in tall ships.
“The Portuguese brought Christianity and guns. My ancestors embraced both. To people living in Sakai in those days it must have seemed an intelligent choice. The harbor was crowded with European ships bristling with cannons and flying Christian banners from every spar. Also, the Jesuits liked to establish missions in poor areas, and despite the silver mines, our ancestral land was still poor. So when a mission was established there at the invitation of my great-great-grandfather, the miners and peasants embraced Christianity without hesitation. Here was a creed that preached to the poor and the meek, and they were both.