Page 51 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘We’re not going to see much of Mori,’ he said. It was a shock to hear it aloud and he had to scrabble for a lie. ‘It’s too far to come to and fro, and the train’s too expensive.’

‘Mori’s optional,’ she said.

He pulled her close. She didn’t like it and squirmed away, but a few minutes later she came back in holding a huge, fluffy owl that didn’t seem to mind being carried round.

‘Six,’ he said, somewhere between laughing and terrified. ‘They bite, put it down.’

‘He doesn’t bite. He’s called Owlbert. He’s coming too.’ She held it out to him, looking awkward, and he realised she was trying to make up for not being as companionable as she thought she should be. Owlbert hooted, a deep smooth purple.

Thaniel had to swallow hard. ‘All right, petal. Let’s go and find a cage then.’

For his part, Owlbert seemed so tame that Thaniel suspected he was probably considered a bit of a holy fool in the owl world. Thaniel took him carefully and held out his arm to see if he wanted to fly away, but the owl only shuffled up closer and pushed his head under Thaniel’s chin.

‘Owlbert loves you,’ Six offered mutedly, not looking at him.

He knelt down to see if he could catch her eye. ‘You know it’s all right to do things a bit differently, don’t you? You don’t have to touch people if you don’t want. Your way’s not wrong.’

She nodded once, still at the floor. ‘No, but yours is, you’re extremely peculiar and trying. You really do take it out of me.’

PART THREE

TWENTY-TWO

Abashiri, Hokkaido, 10th January 1889

Takiko slid the door open a few inches and then jerked back when a lot of snow tried to come in. Her uncle –not really her uncle, more like someone’s second cousin, but they had never quite worked out what – leaned back from the table in the next room when she picked up the spade. She glanced back and he gave her a guilty give-it-a-try motion with one small fist. She made a face at him to make him smile. She had tried to explain that you couldn’t feel guilty about helping less when you were eighty-four, but he wasn’t convinced.

The packed snow was printed perfectly into the shape of the door. She shoved the edge of the spade into it. Like she’d hoped, most of it collapsed, nearly all air and powder, but at about waist-height, it crunched with unpromising solidity. She dug slowly, not wanting to end up tired before she even started work. When she reached the end of the little path and broke out onto the main road, which had been cleared by the early prisoner detail, she heaped up a bit of snow at the edge of the path where her uncle would see it and gave it stick arms, and a face with bits of gravel. After some thought, she gave it a stick headdress as well, since there was no reason you couldn’t have a Mohican snowman.

Her uncle hurried out with a little bento box. In it was a square of shepherd’s pie to heat up. He had heard from some relative or other that she was foreign, and yesterday he had spent four hours looking at an ancient English recipe book he’d sent for from Tokyo, and put together with alchemical precision a perfect shepherd’s pie, because he said she ought to feel at home, and he wanted to feel useful. She squeezed his hands and did her best not to cry.

When she had arrived last week, the days were still clear enough to see Mount Shari. It was a long way off, miles over the marshes, but the peaks had been crookedly white against a blue sky. This week, though, the snow had fallen and fallen, and the murmur at the fish market that spring might be coming early had thoroughly died. Even indoors, her uncle had tied tiny hessian bags around the four pears his pear tree was making. It still looked worse for wear.

Takiko had never been in cold like it. She hadn’t even known that this kind of cold existed in Japan, but that might have been because she had never really thought of Hokkaido as Japan. The island was a great manta-ray shape, and in the northern part of it – Abashiri was right up near the manta ray’s left antenna – you were closer to Vladivostok than Tokyo. It was, everyone said with some pride, the southernmost point in the world where the sea froze.

The cold was convenient, though. It was easy to stay locked indoors going slowly mad with cabin fever, so her uncle hadn’t seemed surprised when she’d suggested she start working at the prison. They lived right next door, her uncle knew the guardsmen, and they had been looking for a cleaning woman for weeks. When her uncle took it up in his shy way with the warden, the warden had said hallelujah, the last girl had fallen in a ditch and frozen to death, and could she start tomorrow.

She stood in the road, holding the spade and looking up at the hill and the prison’s high tower. The cold was unbelievable, the shredding kind, and when she tried to put the spade down, it had stuck to her glove. She unpeeled herself.

She had never been inside a prison. Her uncle said this one was run well, though with fewer staff than it needed. People escaped every now and then, but not from inside; they ran when they were out building the new roads, in the forest where it was hard to see. The warden had solved that problem by dressing them all in bright red.

The main road was ridged with tracks, perfect half-sphere lines that cut through the snow in snaking patterns. Outside the prison gates, the prisoners all wore chains and a heavy iron ball around one ankle. One of the guards had come round for dinner last Wednesday and brought an iron ball for her to try on. She could move it, and it didn’t hurt, not with the thick leather straps that spread the weight, but it would have been impossible to go fast.

Takiko hadn’t gone far when she caught up with the prison detail. The prisoners were a brilliant red splotch in all the white, their guards mounted on either side. One of them saw her coming.

‘Move for the lady!’ he called.

‘It’s all right, it’s easier for me to go around you,’ she called back. He nodded, looking relieved, and she climbed on the hard-packed verge of snow.

‘Eyes front,’ the guard said tightly.

The prisoners were all quiet. The winter was too hard for anyone to think about anything but not freezing to the spot. Having tried the iron ball, she wouldn’t have been afraid of them even if they’d laughed and hooted. She could have outrun them hopping. They weren’t serious criminals, either. The serious ones were marched out at one o’clock in the morning. All last week, she’d woken in the night to the eerie labour song they sang as they trudged to the forest in the coal-pit dark.

The prison was at the top of the hill. On the north side, it overlooked the village and the sea; to the south and the west, there was forest, and to the east, the marshes and the fang of Mount Shari. Over that way, the dead reeds had buckled under the weight of the snow, and that whole stretch of land was a decaying colour almost the same as the strange brown sand on the beach. With the plunge in temperature, the trees were contracting still, and now she was close to them, she could hear their weird laughing, a guttural noise that some prehistoric instinct wanted to get away from.

Snow had blown up against the prison walls like buttresses and settled along the tops of the gates and the watchtowers. It was a vast irregular place. Between the long frozen winters and the warm summers, wood crumbled fast, and so some pieces of the structure were always newer than others and some were rotting. It smelled of fresh-cut wood and mould, and moss, and the sharp salt zing of the sea.

At the little side gate beside the main one, she looked back down the hill. The sea was frozen. It was still moving, just a tiny swaying, crunching bits of ice together in ridges and chunks. She banged on the door.