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The Mulberry Leaf Whispers

By Linda Thompson

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Chapter One


Saturday 18 April 1942
Pacific Ocean, 650 Nautical Miles off the Coast of Japan

SUB-LIEUTENANT MATSUURA AKIRA PACED THE open bridge of Nitto Maru. He had the dawn watch, as usual. Capt. Yoshiwara wasn’t much good before noon. Like his vessel, the captain had seen better days.
Rough seas that morning. It was raining, but not hard. All the same, the swells towered twenty feet above his head.
A stiff breeze drove icy spray into Akira’s face. He filled his lungs, and the bracing tang of sea air assailed his senses. It smacked of everything he loved about life in the Imperial Navy. Rigor. Discipline. And with his nation triumphing against the U.S. and British fleets, a golden opportunity to follow Papa-san in glorious deeds. To prove himself worthy of his long line of ancestors, the ancient lords of Hirado domain.
He’d been born for this—the emperor’s navy. If destiny favored him with a long career, he might even surpass his father’s prestige.
And why shouldn’t it favor him? Why shouldn’t he spend his life winning glory on the seas, as his father and grandfather had done? He, Matsuura Akira, would mark a path his little brother, Hiroshi, would be proud to follow. And his own sons, when he had them. And give the Matsuura women, Mama-san and his sister Miyako, full right to stand tall.
Although this first assignment was a bit…limiting. There wasn’t much chance of glory on this former fishing trawler doing patrol duty a few hundred miles off Japan’s coast.
Ensign Nagai ambled onto the narrow deck ten feet below him, making his rounds, reliable as rain on the China Sea. Even his square face and solid frame conveyed a sense of something immovable.
The ensign paced halfway across the deck, then turned and lifted his face to Akira. The wind whipped the end of his thick muffler. He grabbed it and mouthed something. With an exaggerated gesture, he pointed at the sky, then cocked his head and brought one hand to his ear.
Listen.
Akira cupped his hands behind his ears. Wind. Waves. Spars thrashing. And above it all…
The whine of a propeller in the clouds.
He let out a soft whistle. Odd…especially considering the transmission they’d received a couple days earlier. Command had raised the alert level. They’d have to radio this in.
The thirty-meter boat crested a swell. He scanned the pewter-gray clouds. About half a nautical mile to the east, above the spot where an inch-wide strip of oily light shone on the horizon, the cloud cover thinned.
There. A cross-shaped fleck against the sky, exposed for just seconds. She banked immediately and vanished, bearing east-southeast. Almost as if she turned when she spotted us. He made a little snort at himself. His imagination was working overtime.
But Tokyo had received some piece of intelligence that made them wary. He mused over the question for the twentieth time. With the Americans still nursing the wounds Japan’s navy had inflicted at Pearl Harbor, and with the trouncing the emperor’s fleet had recently given the British at Ceylon, what could the threat be?
Nagai loped across the deck toward him, bounded up the ladder, and saluted. Akira returned his salute.
“Did you identify the aircraft, ensign?”
“Maybe a Zero out of Yokosuka, sir. But I didn’t have a good view.”
Akira heaved a sigh. “Nor did I. And I didn’t see the insignia. We’ll follow protocol and call this in to Kiso. Alert Onishi. I’ll join you in the radio room.” After I do the dirty work of waking the captain.
Nagai descended the ladder and disappeared into the room beneath the open bridge where they’d been standing. Akira followed his ensign to the deck, then took a second ladder below. He walked through the hold, past three seamen snoring in their hammocks, and along a narrow passageway to the captain’s cabin.
He pounded on the door and braced himself for Yoshiwara’s displeasure.
Nothing.
He knocked harder. “Pardon the interruption, sir. We sighted a plane. Shall we report it to Kiso?”
The captain coughed. He said something Akira couldn’t make out.
“Permission granted, sir?”
This time the harrumph from the other side of the door was more distinct.
“Hai.” Akira bowed at the closed door.
He mounted the ladder to the deck. The brisk sea air struck his face again—a vast improvement over the reek of fish offal in the hold. The old fishing trawler would never lose that stench, no matter how the Imperial Navy overhauled her.
He went to the radio room. A gust rattled the door he’d just closed and buffeted the windows.
Midshipman Onishi, at twenty-six the oldest among them save the captain, had his pencil and notepad out and his cipher book open. He stood. “I’m working on the transmission, sir.”
Akira gave him a brisk nod. “Very good. Get it done.” This simple surveillance mission, this foul-smelling vessel—they were Akira’s duty. And he would not see it carried out in a manner that was one whit short of stellar. Even if it was routine.
He dispatched Nagai back to the bridge and helped himself to a cup of lukewarm tea from the flask on the table. He perched on a stool and observed Onishi working out his ciphers. The man seemed to be doing all he could.
Nagai burst back in, his cheeks flushed from the wind. “You might be interested to step outside, sir. Two of our beautiful carriers are on the horizon.”
What’s this? Command should have informed him of any operation in their area. He planted his cup on the table so firmly that tea sloshed out. “Where?” He strode past Nagai onto the deck.
In the distance, gray water met gray sky. He spotted them there—two darker flecks near the horizon, almost due east. He raised his binoculars and dialed them in. The flecks resolved into enormous vessels with elongated decks. Aircraft clustered in neat rows at their sterns. Commanding islands towered amidships.
Two carriers, indeed. Enormous carriers. Along with two—no, three smaller vessels. Cruisers. A sizable task force, bearing toward Japan.
He focused on one of the carriers and took a slow, deliberate breath. This ship looked like nothing he’d seen. He’d toured the emperor’s newest carrier, Shokaku, in the shipyard at Kobe. Its island sat like a stack of blocks. It had a standard curved prow.
The vessel in front of him boasted a dramatic, squared-off prow. And its island stretched above its deck, graceful as a geisha’s neck. She was not the emperor’s.
Nitto Maru’s situation swirled into focus in his mind like his binoculars had focused the scene before him. Only three nations in the world boasted aircraft carriers. His own. And two nations Japan was at war with.
He was witnessing something that hadn’t happened in seven centuries. No enemy since the Mongols had dared venture an invasion of Nippon, the Land of the Gods. And Hachiman himself, the great god of war, had destroyed that fleet with a kamikaze, a divine wind.
Generations of ancestral spirits, fabled warriors all, murmured the truth into his soul. All his life, he’d prepared for the moment he would face an enemy. That moment had come, and he was unlikely to survive it. Nitto Maru was on patrol for one purpose—to radio an alarm to the cruiser Kiso to relay to Tokyo. When his crew accomplished that, the enemy would hear them and almost certainly hunt them.
Barring Hachiman providing another divine wind, this was a battle they would not win. All that was left for him was to make his death a worthy one. Prove it meant something to carry the blood of the Matsuura, the ancient naval power of Hirado Island. And do his best to ensure the crew did the same.
His pulse took up a drumbeat in his ears.
Calm your own mind. The foremost act of war. Ancient wisdom Papa-san had taught him.
He wrestled back a tendril of fear. Tore his focus from the enemy warships and turned to Nagai. “Those carriers are beautiful. But they are not ours.”
The ensign’s eyes went wide. “Sir?”
“Call the men to battle stations. I’ll alert the captain. And ensign—make sure every man puts on his life preserver.”

~~~

Eighteenth Day of the Fifth Month, Anno Domini 1587
Sakaguchi, Omura Domain, Kyushu Island

Omura Sono plucked the last arrow from the bucket at her feet and nocked it. She raised the bow and arrow above her head. She brought her left arm down in a strong arc as she drew the bowstring past her ear. Then farther back, in time with her slow exhale. The polished bamboo shaft glided across her knuckle until everything from her right fingers to her left forearm burned.
She squinted along the shaft at the wooden target set on an easel between two rows of tea bushes, a third of the way down the field. Cicada song throbbed from the stand of mulberry trees behind her.
“Steady.” Capt. Fujita’s voice flowed from behind her in a guiding whisper, nothing like the thunder of command he used with her older brother’s men. “Calm your own mind. That may be called the foremost act of war.”
Sono focused on the center of the target. The hum of cicadas and the wheeze of the captain’s breath disappeared as the target transformed into a fearsome Shimazu warrior charging her on horseback in full armor, his naginata pike aimed at her heart.
She parted her fingers. The bowstring thrummed. The arrow hissed past her ear and whooshed above the brilliant green rows of tea bushes, and…buried itself in the earth behind the target. The bow vibrated in her left hand.
“Che!” She couldn’t help a little stomp of her foot. Only four of her fifteen arrows had pierced the target. The first three had fallen into the bushes well short of it.
“Patience, Sono-chan,” Capt. Fujita said. “Your muscles need time to grow accustomed to the longer bow.”
She huffed out a sigh. “It seems so, sensei.” She had recently graduated to this bow, which stood nearly her own height. Not as long as the bows the samurai used in mounted archery, but powerful enough to make her a worthy defender, shooting around a corner or through a port in a castle wall.
Footsteps crunched the gravel path behind them. She glanced over her shoulder to see her younger brother, Suminobu. This was his fourteenth year but, annoyingly, he had come back from the Jesuit school in Arima standing taller than she did at seventeen. Between his two years at Jesuit school and his eight years as a hostage of their former enemies, the Ryuzoji, she’d had too little time to get to know him.
A familiar twinge of envy jabbed her belly. At least boys went on journeys. As a woman, she would spend her life anchored to a man’s castle. Her father’s. Her brother’s. And soon enough, her husband’s.
She moved her right arm in a slow circle to ease the knot in her shoulder. If she was to be tied to a castle, she would know how to defend it.
Suminobu made a deep bow to the captain. “Greetings, sensei.” And a shallower bow to her. “Honored sister, I thought I would see how you are coming along. You will need a bigger quiver with an aim like that. And a page tagging after you to carry it.” He said it with a superior smirk.
It took real effort to banish the irritation from her voice and show him the deference owed a brother—even an irritating younger one. “Papa-san says I must keep applying myself.” The thought of her father brought a catch to her throat. Trapped by disease inside the elegantly paneled walls of the country mansion to which he had retired when he yielded his domain to her older brother. That was only eighteen months earlier. Now he withered away, barely able to speak, that horrible cough pulling blood from his lungs.
Exactly the thing she was trying not to think about.
The captain grunted. “I do not recall your sister Luzia being so interested in the warrior’s way, Lady Sono.”
And your father saw Luzia well married. No doubt that was the captain’s thought, although he did not say it. Luzia had gone in a good marriage to further an important alliance with a neighboring Kirishitan clan. And she’d already borne a boy.
The question of how well Sono would marry had hung over her for as many of her seventeen years as she could recall. Anxiety squeezed her chest. The problem would soon be her older brother’s.
She pushed that thought away—hard. Her fingers went to her cross pendant. “I want to be ready in case—”
“In case you have to take on the whole Shimazu clan alone?” Suminobu folded his arms across his chest.
“Hai.” She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. “Or the Matsuura—cursed pirates—while you are out on campaign.” The skepticism on her brother’s face pushed her further. “You know as well as I that such a thing took place mere months ago, in Bungo. Myorin-ni fought off sixteen enemy advances against her son’s castle. She was clever and bold. Everyone says it.”
And why should I not be clever and bold as well?
“Everyone does say it. The old widow made an admirable general.” Fujita scowled at Suminobu. “Do not mock your sister. You may not be old enough to remember how hard we fought to repulse the Ryuzoji, but your sister does. And before that? It was the Goto and the Saito with the Matsuura. And before that?” The captain took a ponderous step or two across the platform. “The Matsuura, when they had the gall to sail out from Hirado Island and board the Portuguese Black Ship itself. In our harbor.”
“I remember well, sensei.” Sono watched him lurch on his bad leg. “I remember Mama-san tending to your thigh in the castle courtyard.”
And she would never rub out those memories. How they carried the captain in from the battle raging outside their gates, blood from an angry gash in his leg dripping through the cotton stretcher. The cries of the wounded still haunted her nights, their groans rising above the distant cannon fire. The smell of their blood. And the fear that ran through it all. If the enemies who had done that to Fujita breached the castle walls, what would they do to her? To her mother?
In the end Papa-san had bought peace by submitting to the Ryuzoji and their demands. She had little memory of the much-older half-sister Papa-san had bartered away to their enemy clan as a bride. But when a grinning samurai in Ryuzoji livery had scooped the infant Suminobu, her own baby brother, up onto his big horse and borne him away as a hostage, that loss was keen.
The captain shifted his weight, bringing her back to the present. He puffed out his chest and peered at Suminobu, back home with them at last. “Alliances can be fluid. Your father knows this as well as anyone. His stance as a Kirishitan has won him few friends. And bigger and bigger koi seem to find their way into our pond.” His eyes rested on Sono. The furrows around his mouth softened. “You never know when one heart full of courage can make all the difference.”
Suminobu’s smirk faded. “Of course, sensei.” He directed a bow at her. “Forgive me, honored sister. It is noble to discipline your mind by developing your skills. And wise to be prepared for the worst.”
Even if you are but a girl. He didn’t have to say it.
“It is nothing.” Forgiving him came as easily now as the ripple of annoyance had earlier.
He went on. “And to desire greatness is admirable. But we can be honest, ah? Your most likely path there will be—”
“Bearing a lord’s heir.” She said it with him, then stifled her deep sigh.
Fujita shot a glare at Suminobu. He inclined his head toward Sono. “Do not let your brother discourage you. That was nice work this morning, lady. You will do better with time.”
“Hai, sensei.” His words were kind, but there’d been an odd hesitancy in the way he said do better with time. And something strange about the way he focused off into the fields. As if he knew something she was not meant to know.
Her father had spent his life playing a giant game of Go versus his many enemies. As his last remaining marriageable daughter, she represented a critical piece to place. But unlike Go stones, daughters aged. Lost their marriageable luster. Had her father decided it was time to put her on the board? At seventeen years, her value was at its peak.
If so, she’d have no more say in where he placed her than a stone had.
She thrust her anxious speculations away. “I had best go back up to Papa-san.”
Before the captain answered, one of their father’s servants hurried from the trees, calling out as he came. “Excuse me, Master Suminobu. Excuse me.”
She took in the boy’s panting breaths and wide eyes, and everything around her froze. A sound like ocean breakers swelled in her ears.
“Papa-san?” Suminobu’s voice, barely audible through the roaring.
“Hai.” The boy bowed to her brother, then to her. “Lady Omura summons you both to your father’s mansion. At once.”

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