The Last Concubine Read Free Page B

outside villages refusing to supply porters – and now this!’ he said. ‘How many travellers do we get a day, do you think? A thousand? And even that’s far more than we can cope with. It says here there’ll be ten thousand in Her Highness’s party, without even counting the porters. It will take – what? – four, five days for the whole lot to pass. And we’re supposed to find two or three thousand porters. Two or three thousand! And five hundred horses each day that it passes. Sixthousand pillows. Rice. Charcoal. Dishes. And we’re supposed to feed all the lower ranks. How can we possibly do that? It can’t be done!’
    Otama was a thin, worn woman, her face criss-crossed with thin lines and her hair twisted into a rough bun. Her hands were swollen, cracked and ingrained with dirt from cleaning, cooking, digging and weeding and her back was beginning to bend from years of planting out rice shoots. Her parents had sent her to marry Jiroemon when she was very young, not much older than Sachi. She bore him child after child but after each one died they had eventually adopted a frail, pale-faced baby girl. They named her Sachi, ‘Happiness’, hoping this one at least would survive.
    This much Sachi knew. She had never enquired further. Her young life was far too full ever to think of asking where she had come from or who her parents had been. Half the children in the village were adopted or passed around, depending on which family had a sickly child or needed a son to continue the line, until some people had no idea who their real parents were. No one much cared. You belonged to whichever family you had been adopted into.
    A few years later Otama bore Jiroemon a boy, little Chobei. He survived and other babies followed. She was strong, healthy, hard-working, quiet – everything a man like Jiroemon could want in a wife – and he was devoted to her. Now that Granny had become old and infirm, she was the power in the house.
    She had been watching him closely as he spoke. Silently she laid her bowl and chopsticks beside the hearth, knelt behind him and began to knead his shoulders with her thumbs. He grimaced as she worked on a particularly stubborn knot.
    Finally she spoke. ‘I suppose they told you what a great honour and privilege it is,’ she said. ‘I doubt we’ll see a single copper penny or a grain of rice. They know very well we only have a couple of hundred men at most and fifty-odd horses. Even if we go to all the villages round about we still can’t round up that many.’
    ‘The letter said there might be some sort of financial recompense. But of course they’re not guaranteeing anything.’
    ‘You’ll find a way,’ she said soothingly, pressing her thumbs into his shoulders. ‘You always do.’
    Usually Sachi barely listened to adult talk. It was always jobs that needed to be done, plans, worries, money, gossip, the day’s routine. She let it all flow by and drifted off into her own thoughts. But today was different. Her parents had always been reassuring presences who protected her, admonished her and solved her problems. She had taken for granted that they were not affected by worries and fears, as she was. Now she saw that they were as weak and helpless as her. It made her feel frightened and alone.
    Yet at the same time she was strangely entranced. A princess, passing through their village . . . Princesses had never entered her mind before. Sometimes she saw wealthy merchants travelling with women, some of whom had skin nearly as pale as hers. Perhaps the princess too had white skin.
    She fingered the comb in her kimono sleeve, as she always did when anything was on her mind. She was nearly an adult, and she knew she would be sent away in a year or two. She had seen the older girls disappear. One had gone off to a cousin’s house to enlarge her knowledge of the world and make her a more useful bride, a couple had been taken into service in a samurai household, and the rest had been sent