Seas of Fortune(109)

He looked down at the pillar hole he had dug. Tomorrow, with the help of the local farmers, he would set the pillars in place and place a thatched roof above. Eventually, he would have a hut to call his own.

At least he would not have to farm the land himself. He had just persuaded the peasants that they should feed him in return for lessons in reading, writing and abacus-arithmetic. He might even aspire to be the village’s official scribe. Hah! His yashiki-gami, the guardian spirit of the Inoue, must have been drunk on sake when Katsuo slept in that confounded grove!

His erstwhile ally, the Edo magistrate of the south, had been executed. Good riddance, thought Masahige. Were it not for his incompetence, the plan would have succeeded. Masashige might at this moment be sitting in Edo Castle, in the chamber of the junior councillors, an honored protégé of the shogun.

But the magistrate, instead of simply slaying that busybody ronin, Katsuo, on the spot, had left a fool of a servant to guard him, armed only with a cudgel. Moron. Imbecile. Idiot.

When that sanctimonious prig of a senior counselor, Sakai Tadakatsu, revealed the anti-kirishitan plot to the shogun, Masashige had prepared to commit seppuku. Indeed, he wondered now whether that was what he should have done in the first place, rather than concoct the “gunpowder plot.” That is, carry out seppuku-kanshi, the ritual suicide to reproof one’s lord.

But Masashige’s friends had insisted that he go quietly into exile. His life had been spared at the urging of Iemitsu’s only friend (and former lover), the junior councillor Hotta Masamori. Masamori was one of the leaders of the anti-Christian, pro-seclusion faction within the bakufu, “Do not waste our efforts on your behalf. The Christians will make a mistake, and the shogun will remember that you tried to warn him of their threat. He will forgive you; you will return to Edo in triumph,” Masomori told him.

And Masashige vowed that if he ever got off the island, he would make sure that Katsuo regretted his meddling with affairs of state.

* * *

The privileged Tadakatsu sat with the shogun in the Great Interior, the inner section of the Edo Castle. Through the walls, he could hear the clacks as the shogun’s ladies practiced with the yaginata, the halberd.

Tadakatsu’s star was in the ascendant. He had enriched the shogun by identifying new mines, and making sure they came under Tokugawa control. He had learned of various beneficial political practices which, in the old time line, would soon have been adopted by the shogunate, and was able to gain credit for recommending them at this earlier date. And finally this ronin, the Katsuo, had alerted him to Inoue Masashige’s plot, allowing Tadakatsu to discredit the reactionaries at court. Now, he thought, it was time to tell the shogun of the kernel of truth unwittingly concealed in that plot, and recommend a new course of action.

“What would you say, Great Lord, of a farmer who ate all his saved seed?”

“I would say that he is very foolish, he fills a stomach for a short time, but he dooms himself to starvation in the long term.”

“Ah, and in that lies the genius of Japan, which distinguishes it from the Southern Barbarians. Thirteen hundred years have elapsed since the time of the Emperor Jimmu. How old is the oldest of the barbarian nations? A few centuries at most.

“Their rulers think only of what will profit them over the next month, or year, or perhaps a decade.”

Iemitsu interrupted. “Whereas we also concern ourselves with the tale of centuries.”

Tadakatsu inclined his head. “Such is the genius of the Japanese . . . and the Tokugawa. Now reading these up-time texts, I have found that there was a policy established which served our nation well for many years, but which in the end was our downfall. By this Ring of Fire, the kami and the boddhisatva have given us the opportunity to perceive this pitfall and to moderate that policy for both short and long-term good.”

“What is that policy?”

“The policy of sadoku, in a more stringent form than it exists now. We thought that the greatest threat to the stability of Tokugawa rule was the threat from within, from the missionaries and their converts. And indeed, in the old time line there was an incident, four years from now, which fueled our fears.” The Shimabara rebellion started in December 1637, the end of Kan’ei 15. “But instead it is the threat from without which we must meet, and because of the changes in the world, mere exclusion of western ideas is insufficient. Permit me to explain further.”

Iemitsu heard him out. Finally, he said, “So what do you propose?”

“Of course, Great Lord, you can put all the kirishitan, whether in Shimabara or elsewhere, to death. And I agree that so long as the Southern Barbarians use missionaries to conquer from within, we must keep them out of our homeland and forcibly repress Christianity.”