Japan, 1600

The vow was written, like the others before it, on paper that promised the wrath of every god and buddha should he break it, and he signed with the small ceremony the moment required. Around him the new timber of Fushimi still smelt of the saw; the earthquake had brought the old keep down two years before, and the Taikō had rebuilt it, because building was a thing he could still command.

Now the man who had risen from sandal-bearer to master of Japan lay dead behind the screens, and the fact of his death was a state secret. The armies in Korea did not yet know their war was over. The recall would go out under the regents' seals, as though the Taikō had merely tired of conquest. Men said he had written of dew at the end — that he fell as dew falls and would vanish as dew vanishes, and that Osaka and all the rest was a dream inside a dream.

Ieyasu counted, because counting was his gift. Five regents, sworn to a boy of five. A winter sea between the realm and its armies. And under every oath, the true arithmetic: rice. His eight eastern provinces weighed some two and a half million koku — a koku being what keeps one man alive for one year — and no other regent's lands weighed near it.

He fed the brazier and let the ink dry.

The rope lives in the shrine loft, coiled like something asleep. Ten years ago the Taikō's men came with rope and pole and ledger, walked every terrace this village's grandfathers had cut, and knotted the fields into numbers: this paddy superior, that one middling, the strip under the cedar shade lower-grade. Since then the village is not fields but figures — four hundred and twelve koku, assessed — and Gen'emon keeps the book that says so.

A koku is what one man eats in a year. The edict takes two parts in three for the lord and leaves one for the growers, and the lord's share does not shrink in a bad year. The village owes as one body; that is why the headman sleeps badly in August.

The same lord's men came in the year of the sword hunt and carried off the blades — his father's short sword among them — saying the iron would become nails and clamps for the Great Buddha in the capital, and the peasants be saved in this world and the next. Gen'emon has never seen the Great Buddha. He has seen the rope.

Now horsemen pass on the lake road daily, and the rice merchants of Ōtsu ask polite, pointed questions about the autumn crop. When great lords quarrel, he thinks, they count in koku. What they are counting is us.

Landfall was a line of green mountains in rain, and no man aboard had the strength to cheer it. Nineteen months from the Maas: five ships had sailed, and the Liefde alone had made the crossing, her people dying of scurvy in their hammocks as she came. Of the hundred and ten who left Rotterdam, twenty-four were alive, and but six besides Adams himself could stand. So it fell to him to watch the boats come out from the shore of Bungo.

The men who boarded were courteous and thorough. They turned over the bales of woollen cloth — cloth, in this warm and silken country — and then, with a stillness Adams marked, the rest of the lading: nineteen bronze cannon, five hundred muskets, five thousand round shot, the chain-shot, the powder. A merchantman does not carry such a cargo, and it looked like what it was.

At the stern, carved and salt-worn, rode the wooden figure of Erasmus of Rotterdam — the ship's first name — a scholar who had argued, in another century's wars of faith, for peace. Within days there would be soldiers of those same wars here: Portuguese fathers, hurrying up the coast to tell the lords of Japan that these heretics were pirates, and that crucifying them would be justice.

Adams could not stand for long. He held the rail and studied the green country that was going to keep him.

The silk is weighed at the scale-house by men who care nothing for theology, and the mission lives on the difference between Macao's price and Japan's. Rodrigues keeps the book: so many piculs to the Society's account when the great ship comes in; so many catechists, so many churches, so much rice for the seminary boys at Arima, all paid for out of white thread. He has heard the arrangement called scandalous, in Rome and in Manila. He has not heard the scandalised propose another way to feed a mission of some three hundred thousand souls in a country whose master, three years past, answered preaching with crosses.

He can see the hill from the harbour. Twenty-six crosses that February morning: six friars of Saint Francis, three Japanese of the Society's own, seventeen laymen — the youngest a boy of twelve who asked the guards which cross was his. Paul Miki preached from the crossbeam as from a pulpit. They had been marched a month through winter from the capital, ears cropped. The friars had preached in the open against all counsel, as though Japan were New Spain; the Taikō, raging over a wrecked galleon and a pilot's boast that merchants and friars went before conquest, made no distinction between orders.

Now word comes up the coast: heretics at anchor in Bungo — Dutch guns, an English pilot. Rodrigues enters the silk at its price and thinks: we outlived the crosses. The merchants may be harder to outlive.

Thirteen years ago it was water: a bowl of it, in a locked house, and Maria's own hand. The lady could not go to the fathers — her husband forbade the gate — so the fathers taught Maria, by letters, the words and the manner; and Maria poured, and spoke, and Tama, daughter of the traitor Akechi, became Gracia, which is grace. A servant does not usually confer such a thing. The church allows it where no priest can come. Most of that lady's life happened where no one could come.

Now it is the seventh month, and Ishida's men stand at the gates of the daimyō mansions of Osaka, collecting wives and heirs the way clerks collect seals — each one a rope on an absent lord. The Hosokawa lord is east with Tokugawa. His standing order sits in the house like a smell: his wife is not to be taken.

At evening she sent her women out. Maria argued, was refused, and stood in the lane among the soldiers, who waited awkward as guests. What came after came muffled by walls: the chamberlain's voice, the blow, then smoke unrolling from the eaves. A Christian may not open her own throat; a lady of that house could not be led away; between those two laws there was exactly one door, and her chamberlain held it.

The fires burned down by morning, and all Osaka knew. Men who had been wavering stopped.

It rained all night on the road, and a matchlockman's war is the war of keeping one small fire alive. Magobei slept bent over his coil of match, and at first light the valley of Sekigahara was one white breath: you could hear both armies and see neither.

His piece was forged in Sakai, but its grandmother came ashore at Tanegashima in his grandfather's time — storm-blown Portuguese traders sold the island's young lord two guns, and the smiths copied them by the thousand. It arrived, it was copied, and castles stopped being wooden fences on hills: stone skirts, plastered walls, loopholes cut round and three-cornered, all grown against pieces like the one he kept dry.

Magobei understood the war as it was given out: the eastern lord meant to take a dead man's realm from a living child. Lord Ōtani came to the field in a palanquin, face wrapped in white silk, and set his ranks strangely — not square to the enemy, but square to the friendly hill on the flank, where young Kobayakawa sat with fifteen thousand men and did not come down.

All morning the hill did nothing, and its nothing was louder than the volleys.

Past noon it came down — on them. He fired into banners of his own side until the barrel scalded; the line held twice; then four lesser lords turned where they stood, and there was no line, and Magobei ran while the realm changed owners around him: one small fire going out in wet grass.