Page 96 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

And all the while, the owls stayed on the roof of the Oracle tower.

The first column arrived early in the morning on the thirtieth day. Takiko saw them from the prison gates. The prisoners were in bright red, just like the Abashiri men, but theirs was weather-faded and frosted now. They’d come through the forest, not along the coast. There could only have been roads for a tenth of the way, and they looked exhausted. Only a few guards rode up and down the lines. More than anything, they looked like a defeated army trailing home. She was too far away to see properly, but the stiff way the men at the front moved made it clear enough that they were chained together.

Gunshots rang out inside the prison. She glanced back and hoped they were shooting the cows. They had a herd of their own, because people in town charged mad prices for cheese, but in all the time she’d been here, the cows had proven themselves to be nothing more useful than grain-eating machines. She wasn’t usually much of a beef or milk person, but for the whole of the last week, she’d been craving a proper English Sunday lunch so badly that she’d made herself a meticulous menu for when the spring crept round and the boats ran to Tokyo again. She was getting to the point where she would have cheerfully murdered someone for some proper roast potatoes, the kind they’d made at the old legation when her father had been the translator.

It wasn’t the cows. The guards were shooting men straight over a big open grave. Takiko watched for a second and thought absently that everyone was going to get cholera when the ground thawed.

‘Fuck!’ someone yelled from inside.

It sounded like the warden. She went inside, in case he had finally collapsed, but in fact he was standing at the top of the stairs, in the doorway of his office, holding another telegram.

‘It’s Kushiro,’ he said. ‘The mines have flooded. They’re closing too. The survivors are coming here. As well as Kabato, and bloody Hakodate. Where do they expect me to put them, in a box? We’re going to have to build a new wing – oh, my head,’ he said, and bumped it against the wall. From the window, she saw the gates open, and the first men come through. The warden sighed, straightened again, and seemed to remember something. He patted himself down, went to the hidden door in the wainscoting, opened it, and disappeared up the stairs. She frowned and strayed to it, only to almost bump into him coming back down, leading the old prince by his arm.

‘You’re free, now bugger off,’ the warden said.

‘I’m what?’ the old man said, bewildered.

‘Free! Go away! Make friends with some fishermen or something.’

The man looked helplessly at Takiko, so she gave him directions to her uncle’s house and hoped they would both be as pleased with each other’s company as she thought.

She should have kept quiet, but it was too much. Part of her had swelled up like a hot-air balloon, just ready to float. They needed the cell free. ‘What was it all for, the lock and …?’

‘Oh, every prison in Hokkaido has to have one,’ he said. He glanced down at her. ‘Regulations are to keep it running. Why are you asking me questions? I’m busy. You’re busy. Go away.’

The warden from Kabato was the first through the gates. He looked terrible. He had black frostbite on both hands and across his face, but he bowed stiffly all the same and thanked them for taking his men. Two-thirds of them, he explained, had died of the cold on the way, and so the situation was not as drastic as it might have been. He would have joined them, but he had a prisoner to explain. He glanced bitterly back to the gate, where men in red were trudging through. They all had sacking tied over their boots and the same exhausted hunch.

‘It’s all rather strange,’ the Kabato warden began.

‘It’s all right, you need not explain,’ said the Abashiri warden. ‘I was briefed months ago.’

The Kabato warden shrank by three or four measures. ‘Well, that’s something. In that case, I should be obliged if you would shoot me, sir.’ With some difficulty, he handed over his revolver. ‘I’ll lose both hands and half my face. I shan’t be anything but a damn drag on my wife.’

‘Naturally,’ their own warden said gently. He looked sad, but he was too polite to say anything so patronising as, are you certain. ‘Let’s go outside and find you something nice to look at.’

They went away together and left Takiko watching the men file in. There were so many. She wasn’t used to seeing crowds anymore. The Abashiri work details were only a few dozen. As the courtyard filled up, the guards began to herd prisoners inside, Kabato guards sharing ragged clipboard papers with Abashiri guards and pointing out, she supposed, different varieties of criminal. The murderers bound for the high security wing had come in first.

And then there was a strange hollow in the caravan. People had hurried or lagged to avoid a particular space. In the middle of it was a tall, broad guard who looked like a bear in his winter furs, leading a much slighter man on the end of a chain. Takiko realised suddenly that she was going to go mad if it wasn’t Mori, if she had to wait anymore, and so, ridiculously, to delay the moment she would have to find out, she turned away fast, trying to think of chores. Tea; yes. She ducked into the guards’ empty office to make some tea, six pots so she and the five prisoner-helpers could take enough round for a decent number of people.

‘There’s so few of them,’ one of them said quietly.

When they came back out, the big guard was unlocking the chain around the smaller man’s hands. She knew it was Mori even before he turned around; she didn’t know anyone who moved quite like he did, quick and then slow. He must have had something over someone, because despite all the precautions, he was clean-shaven.

‘Hello,’ she said to the guard. Her voice sounded amazingly steady. The cups on the tray shook when she held it out, but she nearly convinced herself it was just the cold. ‘You look like you’ve had a hell of a time. Tea?’

Attracted to the clink of china cups and the wisps of steam, some of the mounted guards drifted across too. The five tea-bearing prisoners started to hand around cups. The guards only stared at them at first as though tea were an imaginary thing from a story.

‘Oh, lovely,’ said the big guard. His sleeves were covered in frost, but he took the first cup and put it between Mori’s chained hands. He did it with a kind of shy reverence, and a flicker of his eyes that made her wonder if he was anxious to make up for something, the chain maybe.

‘Who’s that?’ she said. There was a lump in her throat. Mori had looked at her, but his eyes had gone straight through and then sharply down at the unexpected heat in his palms. It had made him jump and he frowned. He seemed like someone coming partly out of a dream, and as he stared around, it was plainly the first time he’d been entirely aware of what was around him.

‘Our lucky charm,’ the guard said, smiling over his cup as the others came for one too. ‘He got us all the way through them woods without a scratch on us.’

‘How?’

‘He knows the future. Hey,’ he said gently to Mori. ‘Say hello to the lady …? Sorry, miss, he can’t always tell what’s what in the here and now. He’s not trying to be rude.’

‘Hello,’ she said tentatively, hoping Mori was acting, and absolutely, coldly certain that he wasn’t.