Cloud of Sparrows by Takashi Matsuoka Page A

dung-shoveling jesters?” No more remarks were made. The bearers lifted the palanquin without noticeable effort. The company left the harbor and entered the streets of Edo.

    San Francisco was the largest city Stark had ever visited. There, at the mission, he had heard fabulous stories about Japan from men who said they had sailed there aboard naval frigates, merchant ships, and whalers. They told him of strange customs, stranger sights, and even stranger food. Most fantastic of all, they told him of people, of vast populations in the millions, even in one city alone, the Shogun’s capital of Edo. Stark had listened without believing. His informants, after all, were drunks, derelicts, fugitives. No others came to the mission house of the True Word. Yet the wildest ravings he had heard had not prepared him for the shock of actual immersion into the multitudes of Edo.
    People were everywhere. In the streets, in the shops, in the windows of the apartments above. Though the hour was early, the crowds were such that movement itself seemed impossible. Human life filled his eyes and ears.
    “Brother Matthew, are you well?”
    “Yes, Brother Zephaniah. I am stunned, but I am well.” Perhaps he was not so well. He had grown to manhood in the open rangelands of Texas and the Arizona Territory. He had found home there. There was where he was at ease. Cities were not to his liking. Even San Francisco made his chest tight. And San Francisco was a ghost town compared to this.
    Before them, people cleared the road and without exception dropped to the ground like prairie grass blown flat by a northern wind. One man, finely dressed, attended by a trio of servants and astride a beautiful white horse, dismounted hurriedly and threw himself down, heedless of the dirt that now stained his rich silk garments.
    Stark asked, “What has Lord Genji done to command such respect from the people?”
    “He was born, that is all.” Zephaniah frowned his disapproval. “Members of the warrior caste are at liberty to cut down anyone who fails to show them proper respect. A daimyo, that is the native term for a Great Lord like Lord Genji, has the right to execute a family, even an entire village, for the failing of one individual.”
    “I can hardly believe such barbarism exists,” Emily said from within the palanquin, alongside which Stark and Cromwell walked.
    “That is why we are here,” Cromwell said. “He saveth the poor from the sword, from their mouth, and from the hand of the mighty.”
    Again the missionaries said amen. Genji walked a few paces ahead of the palanquin. He had been listening as closely as he could, yet he had once more missed whatever prayer had been said. Apparently, Christian prayers could be as brief as the mantras of the Pure Land Buddhists or those of the Lotus Sutra sect.
    Suddenly, Saiki threw himself on Genji and yelled, “Danger!”
    At the same moment, a shot rang out.

    “If you have any questions,” Kuma said, “address them to Lord Kawakami.”
    The gunnery captain blanched at the mention of the secret police chief’s name. He turned abruptly and walked away. While Genji and Saiki went to greet the missionaries on the pier, Kuma returned to the armory. He retrieved his own weapon and placed it inside a black cloth case, which he strapped to his back. Then he departed without further delay.
    He knew there was only one road between the harbor and the Okumichi clan’s palace in the Tsukiji district big enough to comfortably accommodate Genji’s retinue. Scouting there the previous night, he had selected a building that stood at one of the curves in the road, a narrow two-story structure squeezed in among others of its kind in the unplanned congestion typical of commoners’ dwellings in Edo. He went there now and climbed to the roof from an alley in the back. No one saw him. If anyone had, that person would have doubted his own eyes. Kuma went straight up the wall like a spider.
    The location was ideal.