Ezo lords had been promised whole provinces as reward for their

help. Such an alliance had happened before when Koreharu had

rebelled. It had taken decades to subdue the uprising.

But then the prince had died, and an extraordinary thing

must have happened next. Kumo had apparently stepped

into Okisada’s place. With Mutobe out of the way, he would

take over the government of Sadoshima and from there join the

rebel army and attack the northern provinces of Japan. He

could hardly claim the throne by birth, but other possibilities

were terrible enough. Because of his carelessness Akitada had

failed to stop him. Even if, by a miracle, he survived this ordeal, and even if Kumo’s rebellion was crushed, there would be no

future for him anywhere.

He fretted over his helplessness and became so discouraged

that he stopped eating, and even the simple act of breathing

seemed an intolerable burden.

It seemed particularly bad one night, or day, when he

awoke, choking and gasping for air. After a moment he realized

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that he was breathing smoke, dense, acrid, throat-searing

smoke. As if being buried alive were not enough, he was appar-

ently about to be cremated alive.

But he was wrong. Just when he was about to give up the

pointless struggle, they came for him.

They cut the ropes and dragged him out of his grave and

back into fresh air, life, and time.

It was nighttime outside, a chill, wet mountain night with a

slight drizzle falling. They dumped Akitada somewhere near a

tree and ran back.

Akitada did not know this and, had he known, he could not

have taken advantage of the perfect opportunity for escape. He

wanted nothing but breath after breath of clean air. He lay on

his belly on the wet ground, shaking with the sudden cold after

weeks in his grave, and coughed in great wrenching spasms. The

moisture in the air he gulped made him aware of a great thirst.

He was breathing water, he thought. He was drowning in sweet-

smelling water. Pressing his face and lips into the rain-drenched

moss, he sucked up the moisture and wished he could stop

shaking and coughing, and just let himself float in the moist,

clean air.

His coughing stopped after a while. He rolled himself into a

ball against the chill and opened his eyes. In the light of torches and lanterns, men darted back and forth, their shadows moving

grotesquely against the cliff face. Others lay about, inert or

barely moving. He thought belatedly of escape, but collapsed af-

ter the first attempt to rise. After that he sat, staring around him, thankful for the air—much cleaner than any he had breathed in

weeks, dizzyingly clean—and enthralled by the visual spectacle

after all the time spent in darkness.

A fire in a mine is deadly not because there is much to burn.

Later Akitada was to learn that there were only the notched tree

trunks the miners used to ascend and descend between shafts,

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265

and baskets and some straw and hemp rope to raise and lower

the baskets, and the many small oil lamps and occasional

torches with which they lit their way through the tunnels. A fire

might start easily if oil was spilled on rope and somehow

ignited, but it was the smoke that did the damage. The smoke

had nowhere to go and seeped through the tunnels, choking

the men.

Eventually Akitada thought of the filth caking his skin and

took off the sodden rag of a shirt. Pressing it against the wet

moss and then scrubbing himself with it was exhausting work,

but he felt better afterward. Sitting there, stark naked in the chill mountain air, he looked around for something to cover himself

with. No one paid attention to him. He crawled over to one of

the still bodies. The man was dead, his eyes rolled back into his

head and his face black with soot, but his clothes, a cotton shirt

and a pair of short pants, were almost dry because he lay under

a tree. Akitada managed to take the shirt and pants off the

corpse and put them on himself. But the effort was all he could

manage. He collapsed beside the dead man and fell into a brief

sleep of exhaustion.

He woke when the goblin and her companion wrapped a

chain around his waist and attached it to the tree. It was loose

enough to allow short steps if he could have stood up. His hands

were tied in front with rope, so that he was much more com-

fortable than in the mine. The corpse was gone, tossed on top of

a couple others. Akitada spent the rest of that wet cold night

leaning against the tree trunk, alternately shivering and dozing,

too weak and tired to take notice of the dark figures milling

about and the coarse shouts and cracks of whips.

The rain stopped at dawn when blessed light returned, a

gray and filtered light here under the tree on a cloudy morn-

ing, but that, too, was a blessing, for his eyes were no longer

used to sun. The goblin returned with a bowl of food. He ate it

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gratefully, sitting up and lifting the bowl to his mouth like a

man instead of an animal. It took so little now to please him.

But the distinction between men and beasts began to blur

again as he saw his surroundings. They were somewhere in the

mountains, fairly high up. Before him was a wide, open space

covered with rubble and stone dust and ragged creatures. Ahead

rose a cliff perforated by many holes, some only large enough

for a small animal to enter, some—like the one from which he

had emerged and around which still hovered a slight smoky

haze—large enough to drive an ox carriage through.

For a mine, it was a small operation. Akitada saw no more

than fifty people. About a third were guards. Several of them

were Ezo, bearded and wearing fur jackets, and all were armed

with bows and swords or carried leather whips. Most of the

miners wore few clothes, and chains hobbled their feet so they

could only shuffle along. So much for Kumo’s gentle treatment

of his workers, Akitada thought. Though these men had been

condemned to hard labor for violent crimes, the number of

armed guards seemed excessive, particularly in view of the con-

victs’ miserable and cowed behavior. Indeed, where would they

run to on this island?

At the moment, they sat or lay on the ground, but already

one of the guards was walking about, snapping a leather whip.

One by one, the men stood, chains clinking, heads hanging,

arms slack. A few glanced toward the corpses, but nobody

spoke.

Some of the miners were half naked, and several of the

smallest had rags wound around their knees and lower arms

like little Jisei. Akitada glanced up at the holes in the cliff face.

They must be the badger holes the doctor had talked about.

The guards rounded up the bigger convicts and marched

them back into the smoking cave opening. They resisted briefly,

protesting and gesturing, but the whip soon bit into their backs

I s l a n d o f E x i l e s

267

and bare calves and, one by one, they disappeared into the

earth. One of the guards followed but returned quickly, gasping

and coughing, to wave another guard in. They took turns this

way, but the convicts only reappeared briefly, dragging charred

timbers or carrying baskets of equipment. The cleanup had

begun.

As the daylight grew stronger, he saw that his knee was still

swollen and the tight skin was an ugly black and purplish red.