Tokyo Bay Read online

  He opened his mouth to cry out in his own defence, but a burial shroud already seemed to cover his face and he could not make his despairing voice heard. Many of the Iroquois squaws hissed and spat in disgust as his dead body was dragged past them and he felt his despair deepen unbearably. Only one of the younger women, her beautiful face tragically stricken, stood aside, weeping silently without tears. The small baby at her shoulder stared in his direction too, its eyes round and wondering, and Eden felt his heart breaking within him. He knew he was right and those who hissed and spat -were wrong; but equally he knew that he would never make them understand what he had tried to do.

  The effort he had made to shoat out had drained something from him, and the pain in his head and body suddenly grew more intense. Paradoxically, although he could see every last detail of the encampment through which the burial procession was passing, the darkness all around him also remained total and unrelieved. Within that darkness the painful jolting and shaking of his living body was continuing, the unseen voices were still murmuring and he could hear the steady continuous clop of horses’ hoofs. From all these tangible sounds and sensations he knew he was not dreaming. The images visible in the midst of the darkness, all his instincts told him, were of a higher reality than dreams. He continued to look around himself and, without any feeling of unease or surprise, he realized that he was somehow experiencing two levels of conscious existence simultaneously: in the selfsame instant lie was perceiving two different fragments of time. With an equal certainty he knew that the two different experiences were directly connected with each other but he could not begin to guess how, because in the blackness, his memory remained bafflingly blank and empty of all clues.

  He tried to raise his head and shoulders but felt himself restrained by the invisible bonds which held him prone. He tried again to cry out, but his voice was scarcely a croak and he knew nobody had heard him. A new wave of despair surged slowly through him, leaving a deeper desolation in its wake. He seemed to be suspended in a state of mental muteness, robbed of all forms of cognition, and how long he remained in this state he could not tell. Then very slowly a new understanding began to suffuse his mind, and he knew he was not after all experiencing another era but that some fleeting vestige of inherited memory locked deep inside the very tissues of his body was echoing and re-echoing into his conscious mind along the shadowy corridors of time.

  He tried hard to sharpen the focus of this fresh understanding but failed. The effort left him utterly exhausted and he felt himself falling towards the brink of sleep. As he did so a bright radiance suddenly filled his vision. It quickly became dazzling, and from its centre emerged the figure of the lovely young squaw he had seen earlier. Her dark eyes burned with love for him in the tragic mask of her amber face, and she looked at him unwaveringly. She was carrying fragrant, oil-bearing berries and herbal plants in her hands and with great reverence she knelt beside him to anoint his racked and broken body.

  The familiar, loving caress of her hands eventually revived him and, sitting up, he rose effortlessly to his feet. On seeing this, her tragic Countenance was instantly transfigured with joy, and she stood up too, staring at him in wonder.

  ‘Only men capable of great love are capable of great daring,’ she whispered softly, moving close to him. ‘You never need be ashamed.’

  He did not reply but stared at her, astounded anew by her beauty and allowed her to take him by the hand and lead him away from the litter of birch branches. The bright radiance continued to surround them, shielding their bodies from the gaze of those watching the burial procession, and they walked away unobserved. When they reached the nearby bank of a deep, fast-flowing stream, she quickly slipped out of her doeskin garment and beckoned to him to follow her into the rushing waters. He immediately flung off his burial shroud and with a shout of elation plunged after her.

  The stream soon emptied into a broad lake and, on entering it, they both dived silently into its still, green depths. Following her down, he swam joyously in her wake, moving easily and watching the rhythmic movements of her naked limbs ahead of him. She had removed the decorated thong of leather which she wore around her forehead and, as she swam, her long black mane of hair swirled out around her shoulders like dark wings. The fragrance and taste of the oil-berries and herbs with which she had anointed him swirled past him in the water and he closed his eyes, following her invisible trail by his sense of smell alone.

  He realized he was breathing the water unthinkingly like air, inhaling the scents of the herbs and the scents of her body simultaneously without harm. She began to tumble and somersault slowly and gracefully ahead of him in celebration of his miraculous resurrection, and he swam purposefully closer, dazzled by the flash of her golden limbs in the clear green waters.

  Recognizing his intention she smiled back at him with her almond-shaped Iroquois eyes and rolled lazily onto her back, kicking her legs slowly and languidly as she watched him approach. Very gently he kissed her moving feet, her calves, her knees, then pressed his mouth more fervently into the soft apex of her thighs and held this fierce kiss of deep passion for a long time. Her long hair flowed in the water all around them as they spun and turned together; he caressed her face, her neck, her breasts, her haunches with his hands, his feet and every surface of his body. She returned his caresses with an equal avidity; her hands and her mouth closing around him again and again. They frisked like children and teased each other, they soared and swooped in the water, he entered and re-entered her, sometimes with great tenderness and sometimes with a loving ferocity; They chased and pursued each other in turn, sighed unending streams of air bubbles to the distant surface, and cried out silently in the deep waters when the long, sweet pain of their passion at last overwhelmed them.

  As they spun and drifted clenched together in a wordless ecstasy, he looked up through the waters of the lake towards the immensity of the wide heavens above and felt his heart swell with gratitude. In those moments when their bodies were fused as one, he knew suddenly that he and she were joined in harmony to the universal source of truth that existed simultaneously in the heavens and in all created things. Their minds and their bodies were joined as one with the waters and fishes and weed fronds of the lake, with its sandy bed and its grass and tree- covered banks as well as with the infinitely broad sky and the clouds above that were reflected in the lake’s placid surface. Because of this understanding, a deep feeling of peace stole over him, an infinite sweetness that spread rapidly through all his limbs, dissolving the last of the pain from his wounds. Without looking at her he knew that she too was experiencing those same profound feelings, and that there was no need for words to pass between them to confirm what he sensed.

  ‘When at last he turned to look at her he was not surprised to find that her beautiful Iroquois squaw’s face was also that of Matsumura Tokiwa, that they were one and the same woman. In the slow swirling of the lake’s natural undercurrents her long dark hair had momentarily piled itself above her head in a loose semblance of a Japanese chignon, and the faint, enigmatic smile in her eyes showed him that she too was aware of his moment of recognition.

  Deeply moved, he embraced her with a renewed tenderness and as they swung slowly in the water, entwined in each other’s arms, he saw that a gigantic, cone-shaped mountain was becoming visible in the fathomless shadows below them. They began to drift towards it and he noticed then that a great black chasm gaped open at its snow-covered summit. He recognized Mount Fuji in the same instant that he realized his memory of recent events was reviving, and as he stared downward into the dark crater he was seized by the feeling that he was gazing into the very soul of the earth. They seemed to accelerate in their spiralling plunge and he began to fear that they would be swallowed up into the terrifying void of the crater. But when he turned in alarm to look at her, he found that the Iroquois squaw who was also Tokiwa was still smiling gently at him.

  ‘The more you love, the more you will understand,’ she whispered so
ftly. ‘And the more you understand, the more you will love - you and all men.’

  Her soothing words calmed his fears and he glanced quickly up at the immensity of the sky still visible above the lake, before turning his eyes down towards the ominous crater of the volcano again. This time he felt his understanding expand, and he knew that the universal source of truth was as much to be found in the hidden depths of the volcano as in the heavens overhead. Reassuringly, both were merely aspects of an infinite progression which continued endlessly in both directions above and below them, and he suddenly also understood that they were themselves an eternally inseparable part of that truth.

  In looking down he also caught sight of a squadron of menacing black ships anchored on a distant bay, with their guns pointed at the defenceless shore. Nearer at hand he could see several groups of moving Japanese figures swarming around the snow-covered peak of the gigantic volcano. Most of the figures carried swords, tasselled lances, bows and arrows, and as he and the beautiful Iroquois-Japanese girl drifted lower in the green waters, they could see that on the mountain the armed men were skirmishing fiercely with one another.

  Some fell, pierced through with arrows, others stumbled and died from lance and sword wounds. One ordinary; defenceless Japanese without armour or weapons was attempting to flee from the fighting, but as they watched he was overhauled and brought down with an arrow. His blood spread quickly on the snow, forming a bright red halo around his head; then his enemies came up with him, lifted his lifeless body in their arms and tossed it brutally over the lip of the yawning crater. The body spun in slow circles like a sycamore wing as it sank into the blackness of the terrible abyss and, watching it fall, Eden’s head spun dizzyingly too.

  ‘It’s Sentaro!’ he heard his own hollow voice saying. ‘It’s Sentaro.’

  Beside him the Iroquois-Japanese girl ceased to smile and her face grew serious. She nodded once very gravely, then again. ‘Yes, Sentaro tried to under- stand too - and he tried to make others understand. Just as the Iroquois brave who was your ancestor did long ago. Sadly they have suffered a similar fate . .

  ‘But why?’ asked Eden in an agonized voice. ‘Why?’

  The corpse of the brave, simple Japanese peasant fisherman was still spinning down into the darkness of the crater, almost lost to sight, and they both watched until it disappeared.

  ‘Because there’s not enough love of brother for brother she said softly. ‘All human beings are of one family. Whether their skins are white or yellow or red, they’re all of the same clan. .

  From somewhere far off a deep and awful rumbling noise began, and grew rapidly louder. A brilliant flash of light momentarily blinded them and a great explosive force filled their ears; they heard the fierce sound of a rushing wind, and the waters all around them were churned and filled suddenly with dreadful showers of dark ashes and debris. The whole earth was shaken alarmingly and Eden, anticipating that Mount Fuji was erupting, turned his eyes downward to watch the awful crater in fearful trepidation.

  But to his astonishment he saw that the great volcano lay dormant and still as before: the devastating convulsions of the earth and the rumbling explosion were coming from far off where a great city was disintegrating and rising into the air, and Eden knew suddenly by some inner instinct that this destruction was caused not by the spontaneous forces of nature but by man. He knew too that it was obscurely linked with the violent death of Sentaro on Mount Fuji and the death of the Iroquois brave that he had seemed to be, although more than a century in time and thousands of miles separated the two events. The ominous black ships he could see riding at anchor, with their banks of heavy guns trained on the naked shore, were also part of the invisible chain of responsibility stretching back into the past and forward to the future.

  ‘The strong have always oppressed the weak because there is too much fear, too little love, too little compassion,’ whispered the Iroquois-Japanese girl, again speaking close to his ear amidst the darkness and turmoil. ‘Humiliation and killing breeds the desire for revenge. Such emotions. are nursed secretly through many generations, until they can be fanned into new and terrible flames of hatred. More killing always follows. .

  When he turned to face her he could see only hazily through the smoky blackness of the falling debris. He was astonished to discover that the small baby she had been carrying on her back, when he first caught sight of her beside the funeral procession, was again swaddled at her shoulder. As before, its eyes were round with wonder as it stared at him, and once more Eden felt his heart breaking at the sight of such purity and innocence.

  ‘Mankind will one day destroy itself unless those who love greatly continue to dare greatly,’ she whispered imploringly. ‘They must dare to bring understanding where there is none. Don’t give up. If you do all will be lost...’

  He kicked his legs to swim closer, reaching out his arms lovingly towards her and his child. But, as he did so, new explosive blasts churned the darkened water and mother and baby were snatched violently from him. Whirling and somersaulting, they turned end over end as they were swept away, and she cast one last beseeching look in his direction before the black turbulence finally swallowed them up.

  He wailed loudly in despair and, as they disappeared from his sight, all the pain of his wounds rushed back into his body once more. With the pain, the blackness around him deepened and the roaring gradually diminished before ceasing altogether. A brief period of silence ensued, then he started to hear again the quieter sounds of horses walking at a steady pace across soft ground; he heard the muffled impact of their hoofs, their gentle snorting and the faint jingling of their harness. He strained his eyes desperately, trying to see again the burial procession, the teepees, the women and children of the Iroquois village - but he could no longer distinguish anything in the black void around him, and knew his eyes must be covered.

  He realized fully then that he was physically restrained by tight bonds, and was lying on his back. Bound and blindfolded, he was being held helplessly captive in some cramped conveyance that was jolting along amongst a procession of quietly moving horses. But it was not, he realized, the Iroquois burial procession. The sounds were similar but distinctively different in a way he could not define. He struggled to make coherent sense of all that had passed through his mind in a very short space of time - but he found his strength was not equal to the effort and with a muffled exclamation f pain he lapsed unknowingly into total unconsciousness once more.

  Reining in his horse beside a black windowless norimono carried by six semi-naked bearers in the middle of his troop of samurai cavalry, Daizo Yakamochi gestured peremptorily for the bearers to halt. When they stopped he waved forward a lantern-bearer, and ordered the barred door of the norimono to be opened.

  Leaning down from his horse, Yakamochi peered inside by the light of the lantern, and studied the inert form of Robert Eden in silence for several seconds. The blindfolded American officer was slumped in the well of the conveyance, bound tightly with ropes from head to toe. The bandage around his head was caked with dried blood, and one of his legs was roughly bandaged too; but he did not move or respond in any way to the light that was shone on his face.

  ‘The foreign barbarian is still breathing, my lord:

  said the lantern-bearer, bowing low and speaking very respectfully. ‘But he continues to slip in and out of consciousness

  ‘It doesn’t much matter what condition he’s in,’ snapped Yakamochi. ‘The important thing will be to produce him on time at tomorrow’s ceremony before Uraga. And that will be the signal for one hundred thousand warriors of Nippon to attack the treacherous American invaders! Close the door now - and continue to guard him well. We’ve got no time to waste.’

  Yakamochi watched the lantern-bearer bar the door of the norimono again; then he wheeled his horse and spurred it at a gallop into the darkness, to take his place once more at the head of the moving samurai troop.

  40

  IN THE GARDEN pavilion from which
Mount Fuji was dramatically visible by day, Matsumura Tokiwa glanced down curiously at her naked body. Was she imagining it, she asked herself, or could she really feel strange new sensations moving within her? Might it simply be the effects of the perfumed bath she had just taken - or was it something more?

  Closing her eyes, she focused her mind inward in an attempt to establish once and for all whether the feelings were real or imaginary They seemed to start in her toes, then flow gently up her legs and thighs, before flooding onward with greater strength through her belly to the tips of her breasts. The sensations seemed at some moments to suffuse her whole body with a warm, gentle sense of fullness

  - yet they remained disturbingly and tantalizingly intangible.

  She had just bathed in a bath-house adjoining the garden pavilion, prior to retiring for the night, and was being dried by her peasant maid. Outside in the moonless darkness the distant cone of Fuji was invisible, but the quiet splash of the miniature waterfall tumbling into the carp pool was a gentle reminder of the garden’s soothing charms. As she listened to the tinkling cadences of the water, Tokiwa wondered whether her maidservant Eiko was in any way aware of what her mistress might be feeling. But when she glanced at the peasant girl who had helped her escape from the village yadoya, Eiko’s placid features betrayed no sign that she had noticed anything unusual.

  During the past day or two Tokiwa had experienced these vaguely pleasing sensations with increasing frequency. But while she paced agitatedly back and forth in the formal garden, or in the pavilion itself, awaiting news from Yedo Bay, she had not allowed her mind to dwell on them. Her thoughts instead had been focused constantly on the black ships and the many thousands of Nipponese warriors who had gathered on the shores of the bay to confront them. Anxiety continued to pervade all her senses, although she no longer felt directly endangered, and she found herself wondering constantly about what might have happened to the blue- eyed foreign barbarian she had encountered with such shocking suddenness in the middle of an extraordinary night.