Page 73 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Of course I am, look at you, you’re falling apart. You look like you’ve frozen to the floor,’ she added to the other guard. He was so tall and spindly that one of his parents must have been Chinese. It was very noticeable next to Tanizaki, who was short and stocky. When he folded down at the kotatsu, he looked ridiculous, because he was too tall for it and he had to hinge all his joints down into the right places one by one like a giraffe.

They both looked pleased when she came back with fish and onigiri. She sat down with them and lifted the spine of her salmon from the rest of it without thinking before Tanizaki laughed that her table manners were too good. He was yanking his fish apart with one chopstick in each hand. His bad one had stopped shaking so much.

‘Mr Tanizaki,’ she said, once they had joked a bit about geisha. He had said it too suggestively, and so she had said she couldn’t possibly be a geisha because the last time she’d played a samisen the cat had run away and been hit by a cart. She made up an unnecessary bit about its guts for good measure. If she could only train him to associate her with disgusting things, he would stop leaning so close when he spoke. ‘You know the big tower, above the warden’s office?’

‘It’s called the Oracle. It was only built last year. Year before?’ He glanced at the tall man, who shrugged. ‘I forget.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘It was meant to be a watchtower. Some new prison regulations came in, everyone had to have a watchtower of a certain height. But it’s never been used that I know. Piece of bureaucratic rubbish, I think. They’ve put in some kind of electrical equipment now, something to do with the weather.’

‘Ah,’ she said, and pretended to lose interest. She sipped her tea.

‘We are a weather station actually,’ the tall man put in suddenly, in the quiet. ‘They send all the readings to Tokyo. There’s no better place to gauge south-coming storms. You know what Shiretoko means, in Ainu?’

She shook her head. Shiretoko was the name of the whole region, their manta-ray antenna at the top of Hokkaido.

‘The end of the world.’

‘That’s accurate,’ she said.

‘You made that up, Oemoto,’ Tanizaki laughed. ‘Unless you’ve been hanging round with the Ainu on your days off.’

‘No, they told us at school. I had a Russian science teacher. It’s like Russian, Ainu—’

‘Oh, the famous science teacher!’ Tanizaki grinned and thumped him. ‘He fell in love with a Russian science teacher, it was very sad,’ he explained to Takiko, then giggled when Oemoto thumped him back. ‘Get off, it’s not slander if it’s true—’

Tanizaki collapsed. Oemoto only stared at first. ‘Hey – stop pissing about – Tanizaki …’

When she came around the table he was seizing. She dropped down and held him still as best as she could. Oemoto knelt beside her to help.

‘Is there a doctor here?’ she said.

‘Gatehouse – yes. Dr Fujiwara.’

By the time she had run back with the doctor, the seizure had stopped and Tanizaki was picking himself up slowly, white and shaken. The doctor listened to his heart and looked into his eyes and said he was as all right as he was going to be, though he didn’t look convinced. The seriousness was noticeable, because it didn’t suit him. His name, Fujiwara, meant wisteria, and he had a bright purple cravat on to match. He must have been quite a flamboyant person normally.

It wasn’t only the staff who were ill. As Takiko let herself out through the delivery gate, which she was using on her way home now to avoid looking at the solitary confinement shed, she saw, just down the hill, that there were bodies with red clothes in the long rubbish trench, dozens and dozens, not quite covered by the snow. Not far away, the birch woods creaked and groaned, white on white, and from somewhere inside came drumming. When she looked that way, an Ainu woman was watching her. She was holding a rich bundle of sealskins, and she looked unearthly, because she had a solid black tattoo right across her mouth like a gag. Her clothes were all bright colours; it must have been one of their ceremony days. Their festivals had been banned, technically, but as far as Takiko could tell, the Ainu ignored mainlanders as a passing nuisance and went on like they always had. The woman turned away and disappeared into the birch wood.

The drums had disturbed half the birds in the woods. An owl soared right over Takiko’s head and fluttered up to land on the eaves of the Oracle tower. There were six others already there.

TWENTY-NINE

Tokyo, 13th February 1889

Thaniel snapped awake. Someone was leaning right over him. Their noses were almost touching. He could feel that tiny electric warmth that came a fraction of an inch above human skin. It smelled of ash. The taste of it settled right in the back of his throat.

He couldn’t open his eyes or move. He lay exactly still and had to tell himself it was a nightmare while he screwed together the courage to sit up.

The person, the thing, grabbed his shoulders and squeezed. He spun over to the side and bumped the hearth, on his hands and knees and with all his tendons singing with the urge to run.

No one was there.

The fire was smoking badly and the room had filled with soot. Thaniel pitched the water jug over the grate, then pushed open the window as wide as it would go. He was choking now, the ash like cement when he swallowed. Once he was calm enough to listen, he heard how his lungs were wheezing on deeper breaths. He crossed the room and bent to see the door latch. He could sleep in the translation office. There was a couch down there and the air would be better. His shoulder hurt and hurt. Lying on the floor hadn’t done it any good.

It wasn’t until he had opened the latch that he saw his own shirtsleeves. When he did, the strength went out of his hands. Across his shoulders, very clear in black soot smoke stains, were two handprints.

Thaniel checked everywhere – under the bed, in the wardrobe, behind it, outside in the corridor – but there was no one. The legation was silent. Not even the servants were moving about now. He stood in the open doorway, waiting to calm down.