Page 78 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

THIRTY

Aokigahara, 13th February 1889

Travelling to Fuji in as straight a line as anyone could, you came first to Aokigahara Forest. It really did look bluish in the deep mist and shade of the mountain, which took up the whole sky in one titan wall of white snow. The taste of iron had grown stronger the nearer to the mountain Thaniel came. It stung his teeth, even though Willis had given him morphine for the journey.

He had a stagecoach to himself. Everyone else, the driver said, wanted to go the other way.

On the other side of the road, people were moving north in a great caravan, carrying bundles and children on their shoulders, or on oxen. Everyone was smoke-stained. A lot of them had noticeable burns, and they all stared at the stagecoach. Someone shouted, wanting to know if Thaniel was from the government. Someone else saw that he was white and slung a melon at the side of the coach, and yelled something about fucking Americans. Other people realised and yelled too, and more things thumped on the door and the window. He put the blind down. It had to be the volcano; but nobody could blame Americans for the volcano. When he asked the driver if he could get out and ask someone, the driver told him that he did not refund the families of those lynched in his coach, thank you.

Soon, the road emptied. Everyone who was leaving had left, and the way turned quiet. Thaniel put the blind up again. The trees that flanked the road were grey now. He thought at first that it was snowing, but it was ash. The land, which had been lush before, had faded and deadened. Nothing was bright but what had been left on the side of the road.

Some of the abandoned things were big, like oxen harnesses or cartwheels. But mainly it was jewellery and money. People had just flung coins and watches away, and the verges, ashen and colourless, glittered with a jetsam of gold and silver. Someone had left a collection of rings on an old tree stump. They had become so hot that the stump was smoking.

The coachman had to stop well before the forest. The roads were shut. Had been for months; something to do with the army, he said. Thaniel walked the last mile – very slowly, and not too steadily – and when he reached the barrier, he could see why the driver hadn’t wanted to go any nearer to it.

Across the road, and in both directions on either side, vanishing into the woods, was a tall fence. Copper wires stretched between posts about nine feet high, whickering with electricity. Thaniel lobbed a stick at it. The stick caught fire.

A klaxon went off. In the silence of the forest – and it was silence, because no animals rustled and no birds clipped among the pines – it was shockingly loud. The whine was deafening, and the whole world exploded into white, which greyed and then brightened painfully and greyed again as the klaxon lifted and fell. He got off the road, fast, and ran to the darkest patch of woods. There must have been a seam of iron just underground, because the frost had melted in a swathe, and the trees smelled cloying with sap and warm needles.

‘Fucking kids,’ someone complained, a man. ‘Oi! You little pissheads, I know you’re hiding out there somewhere!’ he shouted into the trees.

Thaniel didn’t breathe while the soldiers stood and listened. In the warm patch, the white blanket of the road had turned to snow bones and dead earth. He could feel himself sinking in the mud and he had to shift onto the roots of a tree instead. It wasn’t the kind of tree that had grown with hiding people in mind; it wasn’t tall or broad or straight, but narrow and crooked, and he had to crouch.

Once the men began to walk away, he straightened, agonised for a second, then tucked his bag into a dry hollow and followed them. There was a small watchtower not far away. It didn’t look new; it was the ruin of something else, part of an old temple or something that someone had only reroofed. He paused at the door, told himself to calm down, and knocked.

‘You’ve got some nerve, you little – oh,’ the soldier said. The surprise had nearly made him squeak. He frowned. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m from the Ministry,’ Thaniel said. He could imitate Mori exactly when he concentrated. It hurt to do, because he had to listen to Mori’s gold voice in his memory, but it was courtly, and never the voice of someone who was not who he said he was. ‘You’d have been expecting me, but the telegraphs in Tokyo are out and you know what happened when we tried the bloody messenger pigeons.’

The soldier paused uncertainly. He was just young enough to want to say yes, he did know things, even when he had no idea about any pigeons. ‘Right, of course. You don’t look like you’re from the—’

‘Says everyone; it’s a drag. You haven’t got some tea, have you, before I have to slog up the mountain?’

‘Um – sorry, may I see your papers?’

‘Afraid not.’ He tipped his shoulders back and concentrated on looking rueful, and embarrassed. ‘You try swimming upstream in a nice coat when everyone and his dog is running the other way with nothing but what he can carry. It provokes people.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I was mugged,’ Thaniel said. ‘Papers, money, the lot.’ He held his arms wide to show he wasn’t carrying anything. Stretching made the gunshot wound zing nastily, and the bruises down his ribs ached. He felt light-headed and promised himself more morphine once he was through the fence. ‘You’re not going to send me all the way back to Tokyo now, are you? The Minister will be livid.’

‘Well …’

‘What’s your name? Private …?’

‘Oh. Oh – of course, no, just come in,’ the young man said, looking like he might be about to suffer some kind of internal collapse. ‘We’ve got tea. Come in.’

The soldiers were local, recruited especially, and they seemed relieved to chat to someone who didn’t want to throw things. After the tea, they directed Thaniel up along the road, and warned him that it might be different to what he would have seen on previous visits.

Once he was out of sight, he took some more morphine and leaned against a tree until it kicked in. He’d been worried when Willis gave it to him that it would make him hazy and heavy, but in fact all it did was take a lot of the pain away and fill him with a gentle sort of optimism.

He walked slowly to the village that lay at the foot of the path up the mountain. His watch was getting warm in his pocket. He’d already wrapped it in a handkerchief, but if it kept heating up he would have to leave it and he didn’t want to think about that. Mori had made it. Everywhere, the ash drifted on thermals. It was turning the real snow a dead, cement grey.Despite the morphine cheer, he was starting to feel the same unease that he’d had at Yoruji. That weird certainty that, for all he could see he was alone, he was being watched not just by one person, but a legion.

He paused when he came to a herd of goats scattered across the gravel road. They were nibbling at the grass growing up through the muddy patches. No one seemed to be with them. He walked around them rather than through, aware that one of the older nannies was watching, horns tipped down and ready.

When he pushed his hair back from his face, it crackled with static. The dark was coming down now, earlier than it would have in Tokyo. The sky was very clear, and cold.

Up ahead were other lights. He thought it was the lamps in the village, but then suddenly he was in the village and the lights looked no closer. The buildings were dark. The ash was very thick now, gathering along the folds of his coat sleeves.