Two guards rushed over to him. “Kinjiru! ” they shouted. One of them made a motion with his rifle: get up.

“So sorry, soldier-san,” the American soldier said, shaking his head. “Can’t do it. Too damn tired. Let me rest-a little. Then I’ll come.”

“Kinjiru! ” the guards yelled once more. The one who’d gestured did it again. When the American didn’t get up, they both kicked him. He howled and rolled over onto his side. They waited a moment, then kicked him again. He groaned. With an effort, he made it to his hands and knees. They waited a minute or so. When he didn’t get to his feet, they kicked him some more. Plainly, they were ready to kick him to death if he didn’t straighten up and fly right.

He must have figured that out at about the same time Peterson did. With another groan, he heaved himself up onto his pins. He stood swaying like a cypress in a hurricane, but he didn’t fall down. One of the guards shoved him back into the pack. Two POWs caught him and held him upright; otherwise, he would have fallen on his face. The other guard used his rifle to urge the whole gang of prisoners forward again.

The exhausted soldier had a devil of a time going forward. The guards watched him like wolves eyeing a sickly elk that couldn’t keep up with the herd. If he fell again, he was theirs.

He saw it, too. “You better get away from me, boys,” he croaked. “If they decide to shoot me, they might hit one of you by mistake.”

Rage kindled in Peterson. “Fuck ’em all,” he said. “We’ll get you there, goddammit.” He draped the flagging man’s arm around his shoulder. “We’ll take turns.”

“I’ve got him next,” Prez McKinley said. Other men clamored to volunteer. The Japs didn’t make a fuss. As long as everybody kept up, they didn’t care how. Peterson strode ahead, taking his weight and a good part of the other man’s till Prez cut in on him, almost as if at a dance.

This’ll work as long as most of us are sound enough to help the ones who aren’t, he thought. Good thing Oahu’s a small island. They can’t take us too far. This might turn into a death march if they could.

As the sun sank down toward the Waianae Range, a couple of trucks forced their way through the column of prisoners. They were U.S. Army vehicles, the white star on the driver’s-side door hastily painted over with a Japanese meatball. “Goddamn guards didn’t want to shoot them for going around the holes in the road,” Peterson whispered to Prez McKinley.

“Oh, hell, no,” McKinley whispered back. “They got Japs driving ’em. You suppose they’ve brought rations for us?”

“That’d be nice,” Peterson said. In spite of the Japanese officer’s promise, the prisoners had got no food as they tramped up Kamehameha Highway. Peterson’s stomach was growling like an angry bear.

But instead of rations, the trucks disgorged machine-gun teams, who deployed onto high ground from which they could rake the throng of prisoners. A Buick came up a few minutes later. In it were the Japanese officer and his local stooge. The officer spoke in his own tongue. The translator turned it into English: “If anyone tries to escape, we will open fire on all of you. You are responsible for one another. See to it.”

“Where’s our food?” The question came from half a dozen places in the crowd.

The local obviously didn’t want to translate it into Japanese. But the officer nudged him, just as obviously asking what was going on. The local Jap spoke. So did the officer. The fellow in the sharkskin suit said, “You disgraced yourselves with disobedience at the first hole in the road. Going hungry is the price you pay. You should be thankful it is no worse.”

Jim Peterson was anything but thankful. With all those machine guns staring down at him, though, he couldn’t do a thing about the way he really felt.

JIRO TAKAHASHI AND his sons looked over the Oshima Maru. As she bobbed in the light chop in Kewalo Basin, she hardly seemed like the same sampan. A tall mast and a gaff rig changed her into something much more graceful than she had been with a diesel stuck on her stern. That she was also much slower than she had been and dependent on the breezes seemed almost an afterthought.

“She’s ready,” Eizo Doi said. The handyman cracked his knuckles, producing a noise alarmingly like a machine-gun burst. “You sure you know what you’re doing with her, Takahashi-san? If you don’t, you should only take her out a little ways the first few times, till you get the hang of it.”

“I’ll manage,” Jiro said. “I helped my father man a boat on the Inland Sea. How to place the sail and which line to pull, they’ll come back to me soon enough. What I really need to do is show the boys how everything works.”

Kenzo said something to Hiroshi in English. Jiro caught the words Moby Dick. Was that some sort of strange obscenity he’d never heard before? He knew what a dick was, but the moby part went right over his head.

“Please yourself,” Doi said. “Just don’t get in trouble before you finish bringing me my fish.” The way things were these days, most people were happier to get paid in food than in cash. As supplies got tighter, mere money bought less and less. Nimble as a mongoose, Doi hopped up onto the wharf. “Good luck,” he told Jiro, and bowed. The fisherman returned it.

Half a beat slower than they should have, so did his sons. No, they aren’t properly Japanese at all, Jiro thought with yet another mental sigh. Eizo Doi was polite enough to pretend he hadn’t noticed they were slow. He ambled off towards another sampan. Jiro wondered if he was doing anything these days besides putting masts and sails on boats that couldn’t use their engines any more.

Jiro stepped down into the Oshima Maru. Hiroshi and Kenzo followed a little more slowly. They couldn’t act as if they knew it all here, because they damn well didn’t. “Okay, Father. What do we do?” Hiroshi asked. The first word was English, but Jiro got it.

“Here-you go to the rudder for now. You know what to do with that, neh?” Jiro said, and his elder son nodded. Jiro turned to Kenzo. “All right, you come with me.”

“I’m here,” Kenzo said.

“Good. First we find which way the wind is blowing,” Jiro said. For the moment, that was easy: it came off the hills in back of Honolulu, and would waft the Oshima Maru out to sea. Once the sampan sailed out onto the Pacific, though, things would get more complicated. “Next thing to remember is, mind the booms. They can swing and knock you right into the water.”

“Hai,” Kenzo said. Jiro looked back toward the stern. Yes, Hiroshi was listening. Good. He would need to know, too.

Jiro went on, “We set the foresail to one side of the mast and the jib on the other.” He did that, then tied the booms to the belaying pins Doi had mounted on the rail. “Now we cast off, and we’re ready to go.” He brought in the rope that bound the Oshima Maru to the wharf.

Light as a feather, the sampan glided out of Kewalo Basin. Hiroshi steered well enough-he did know how to do that. Even so, a look of surprise and delight spread over his face. “She feels so different!” he exclaimed.

And she did. Before, with the motor pushing her forward, she’d been a creature of straight lines. If the small waves were moving at an angle to her path, she’d just chopped through them. Not any more. Kenzo noted another essential difference: “She’s so quiet, too!”

Jiro had got used to the relentless pounding and throbbing of the diesel. Without it, the Oshima Maru might have been a ghost of her former self. All he heard were the waves and the distant squawks of sea birds and the breeze thrumming in the lines and bellying out the sails. The sampan also felt different underfoot. He’d always got the engine’s vibration through the soles of his feet. They’d told him as much about how it was running as his ears did. Now all he felt was the boat’s pure motion. He smiled. He couldn’t help himself. “I’m younger than you are,” he told his sons. “I’m with my father on the Inland Sea.”