Shogun_ A Novel of Japan - James Clavell [63]
Omi barely nodded at them as he strode past, but then a girl came out of the neat gateway to go to the palanquin and he stopped.
Blackthorne caught his breath and stopped also.
A young maid ran out to hold a green parasol to shade the girl. Omi bowed and the girl bowed and they talked happily to each other, the strutting arrogance vanishing from Omi.
The girl wore a peach-colored kimono and a wide sash of gold and gold-thonged slippers. Blackthorne saw her glance at him. Clearly she and Omi were discussing him. He did not know how to react, or what to do, so he did nothing but wait patiently, glorying in the sight of her, the cleanliness and the warmth of her presence. He wondered if she and Omi were lovers, or if she was Omi’s wife, and he thought, Is she truly real?
Omi asked her something and she answered and fluttered her green fan that shimmered and danced in the sunlight, her laugh musical, the delicacy of her exquisite. Omi was smiling too, then he turned on his heel and strode off, samurai once more.
Blackthorne followed. Her eyes were on him as he passed and he said, “Konnichi wa.”
“Konnichi wa, Anjin-san,” she replied, her voice touching him. She was barely five feet tall and perfect. As she bowed slightly the breeze shook the outer silk and showed the beginnings of the scarlet under-kimono, which he found surprisingly erotic.
The girl’s perfume still surrounded him as he turned the corner. He saw the trapdoor and Erasmus. And the galley. The girl vanished from his mind.
Why are our gun ports empty? Where are our cannon and what in the name of Christ is a slave galley doing here and what’s happened in the pit?
One thing at a time.
First Erasmus: the stub of the foremast that the storm had carried away jutted nastily. That doesn’t matter, he thought. We could get her out to sea easily. We could slip the moorings—the night airflow and the tide would take us out silently and we could careen tomorrow on the far side of that speck of island. Half a day to step the spare mast and then all sails ho and away into the far deep. Maybe it’d be better not to anchor but to flee to safer waters. But who’d crew? You can’t take her out by yourself.
Where did that slaver come from? And why is it here?
He could see knots of samurai and sailors down at the wharf. The sixty-oared vessel—thirty oars a side—was neat and trim, the oars stacked with care, ready for instant departure, and he shivered involuntarily. The last time he’d seen a galley was off the Gold Coast two years ago when his fleet was outward bound, all five ships together. She had been a rich coastal trader, a Portuguese, and she was fleeing from him against the wind. Erasmus could not catch her, to capture her or sink her.
Blackthorne knew the North African coast well. He had been a pilot and ship’s master for ten years for the London Company of Barbary Merchants, the joint stock company that fitted out fighting merchantmen to run the Spanish blockade and trade the Barbary Coast. He had piloted to West and North Africa, south as far as Lagos, north and eastward through the teacherous straits of Gibraltar—ever Spanish patrolled—as far as Salerno in the Kingdom of Naples. The Mediterranean was dangerous to English and Dutch shipping. Spanish and Portuguese enemy were there in strength and, worse, the Ottomans, the infidel Turks, swarmed the seas with slave galleys and with fighting ships.
These voyages had been very profitable for him and he had bought his own ship, a hundred-fifty-ton brig, to trade on his own behalf. But he had had her sunk under him and lost everything. They had been caught a-lee, windless off Sardinia, when the Turk galley had come out of the sun. The fight was cruel and then, toward sunset, the enemy ram caught their stem and they were boarded fast. He had never forgotten the screaming cry ‘Allahhhhhhhh!’ as the corsairs came over his gunwales. They were armed with swords